First day of my 'Halloweek' series is a nice Autumnul recipe for Pumpkin Spiced Cupcakes. I made these last week with my sister and was really pleased with how they turned out.
I found a basic cupcake recipe in the 'Mary Berry: 100 Cakes and Bakes' book and altered it slightly to accommodate the mixed spice and ground cinnamon. Before anything else you have to set the oven to Gas Mark 4 and put your chosen cupcake cases into the tin - I chose a lovely metallic gold colour from Sainsburys.
I love Mary Berry recipes because you just shove everything into a bowl and mix it up and I can't be doing with all that faffing around with different ingredients at different times. I used a wooden spoon to mix everything up, but in an ideal world use a mixer and it'll be done in no time.
Once everything was mixed together I used an ice-cream scoop to get an even amount of cake mix into each cupcake case. This recipe makes 12 and it split perfectly.
Here they are - all ready to pop into the oven!
Unfortunately the recipe said to bake for 25 minutes and I think that was a little too long as the edges of a few of these caught - luckily they still tasted okay, but if I did these cakes again I'd bake for 15-20 minutes max.
When I first decided I wanted to make these cakes I couldn't decide on which frosting to do - first I was going to do a buttercream but I wasn't sure how the cinnamon would mix with the butter and so I finally decided on a cream cheese frosting.
I really believe cream cheese frosting is the easiest out there - first mix the cream cheese with the sifted icing sugar.
Then add your ground cinnamon. We ended up going for 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, but it was a taste test job so just add as much or as little as you want depending on how strong you want the flavour.
Mix it all together so it has an even taste all the way through.
Once your cakes are completely cool you can start on the best bit - decorating! We piped half of them using a standard star nozzle and did the rest with a spreading knife and warm water to keep the top smooth. I got the Halloween decorations in Home Sense - they had a HUGE range, but I finally settled on the sour pumpkins and the Halloween sprinkles.
We put a pumpkin on top of all the piped ones and used the bat sprinkles on the ones with the smooth tops.
If I did them again I would do piping and pumpkins on all 12 as I think they look the best, but it was a quick and easy decorating technique that I'm confident anyone could do.
I was really happy with how these little guys turned out and they tasted damn good too! They were really easy to make and can easily be adapted with decorations that aren't Halloween themed - I think they'd look really nice with cinnamon sticks as decorations just as a nice Autumn treat.
Thanks for reading - look out for my next 'Halloweek' post tomorrow - it's going to be spooktacular!
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