Pumpkin Muffins

What to do with all the time I get to spend at home during the snow storm which is supposedly the 6th biggest ever in New York City? I made muffins. From canned pumpkin. Well, organic canned pumpkin no less.



I started off with the trusted low sugar, low fat, half whole wheat flour muffin recipe that I always use. Replaced all the liquid in with pureed pumpkin and added a little bit of lemon juice to activate baking soda.

The muffins came out not awesome, but not bad either. They were best when warm and moist a couple of hours out of the oven. Maybe some raisins or nuts will enhance them a bit by giving contrasting texture and sweetness.



Ingredients

• 1 cup (4.5 oz) whole wheat flour


• 1 cup (4 1/4 oz.) all purpose flour


• 1 teaspoon baking soda


• 1/2 teaspoon salt


• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon


• 1 teaspoon ground ginger


• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg


• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves


• 1/2 cup (4 oz.) sugar


• 1 14 oz. can pumpkin


• 2 eggs


• 1/4 cup ( 1 3/4 oz.) light tasting olive oil


• Juice from half a lemon

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a muffin pan.


2. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt and all the spices together.


3. In a separate bowl, whisk pumpkin, sugar, eggs, oil and lemon juice until well combined. Pour over the flour mixture. Fold together until just combined.


4. Divide the batter into the prepared muffin pan. Bake for 20 minutes.

Spiced Pumpkin Cake with Caramilized Apples and Cream Cheese Frosting

My computer blew up two weeks ago. It wasn't even that old - only 6 years. These electronics. Sometimes I wonder if the manufacturers put inside them timers. When certain pre-determined date is up, it just stops working.

I managed to get it to work again by wiping out everything and reinstalling the operating system - a great meditation on letting go... (Well not really, I have all my data backed up.)



When this cake was first requested for a birthday party, I said WHAT??!! Pumpkin and apples in the same cake? But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. They both go well with Fall spices like cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. And with lots of butter and sugar, everything will taste good. I decided to make pumpkin cakes layered with caramelized apples and frosted with cream cheese frosting. The result was pretty impressive. Caramelized apples kept the cake moist. Very lightly sweetened cream cheese frosting added the right touch of tang and smoothness to the spiced cake.



Spiced Pumpkin Cake
Adapted from Spiced Pumpkin Cake with Caramel Icing on Epicurious.com

• 3 cups all purpose flour


• 2 teaspoons baking powder


• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon


• 1 teaspoon ground ginger


• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg


• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves


• 1/2 teaspoon salt


• 2 sticks butter - at room temperature


• 2 cups sugar


• 4 eggs


• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract


• 1 15oz. can pumpkin

Caramlized Apples

• 2 small apples - diced (I used Honey Crisp.)


• 2 tablespoons sugar


• 1 tablespoon butter

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 2 sticks butter at room temperature


• 2 packages cream cheese at room temperature


• 1 cup to 1 1/2 cups confectioner sugar

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and line the bottom of three 9-inch round cake pans with parchment paper. (I made one two-layer cake and one single layer cake.)


2. Combine flour, baking powder, all the spices and salt in a clean bowl.


3. With an electric mixer, beat 2 sticks of butter and 2 cups of sugar together until fluffy - about 3 minutes. Add eggs one at a time. Beat well between addition. Scrape the bowl occasionally.


4. Stir in the flour/spice mixture alternately with pumpkin in 3 batches until well blended.


5. Divide the batter into the prepared pan. Spread the batter to get flat surface. Bake for 30 minutes. Rotate the pan after 20 minutes. Turn the cakes on cooling racks and let cool completely.


6. For caramelized apple, cook diced apples with 1 tablespoon butter and sugar in a saucepan. Stir occasionally until the apples are tender about 5 minutes. Let cool in the pan


7. After the cakes cool, beat 2 sticks of butter and 2 packages of cream cheese together with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add confectioner sugar. Slowly increase the mixing speed until every thing is combined.


8. To assemble the cake, spoon cream cheese frosting onto the outer edges of the bottom cake layer, pour apples in the middle. Stack the second cake layer on top. Repeat with the second layer if you are making 3 layered cake. Otherwise, frost with the rest of frosting.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

Ha Ha! The 5th consecutive pie post. Congratulations to me although these are actually cookies. I don't know why they call them pies. English is kind of messed up. I looked all over the place to find out why. Even Wiki just says that they are traditionally made from leftover chocolate cake batter - nothing on the name...



I followed this recipe from MarthaStewart.com. Instead of ready-made pumpkin pie spice, I used my own spice mix:

• 2 teaspoons cinnamon


• 1 teaspoon nutmeg


• 1 teaspoon cloves

That's a total of 4 teaspoons of spices. I used have (2 teaspoons) for the cookies and the other half for the frosting. I know, that's 4 times the spice from the recipe, but I like my food spicy.



The cookies came out tender, perfectly spiced and not too sweet - perfect to sandwich with creamy cream cheese frosting. I used my usual cream cheese frosting recipe with added 2 teaspoons of the above spice mix. I didn't think I would need that much. I kept adding spices into the frosting half a teaspoon at a time and ended up using all of it. Cream cheese has its own very strong flavor.



Pumpkin spice cream cheese frosting

• 1 stick butter - room temerature


• 1 cup confectioner sugar


• 1 package 8oz cream cheese


• 2 teaspoon spice mix (see above)

The cookies got a lot of compliments especially how perfectly spiced they were!