Gluten free pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin frosting

It's that time of year again when we buy our pumpkins from the local store, spend an hour or so scraping away the inside and carving a face on it only to have to throw it all away a day later. How sad!

I can't say I am that fond of pumpkin. I always feel it is such a waste to throw the perfectly good flesh away but whenever I try to use it for some recipe or other it always comes out yuk! Pumpkin soup - not great (although the little snowballs liked it), roasted pumpkin - a sloppy mess ... so where am I going wrong?

I came to the conclusion that it is not me, it is the pumpkin's fault. I bought a can of pureed pumpkin just to prove to myself that it is the pumpkin and made a discovery. Pure pumpkin has a very specific taste - not one that I am keen on personally - but if you add lots (and I mean lots) of spices, especially cinnamon, it can be quite nice!

So yesterday, we were invited to a post Halloween party and I decided to make pumpkin cupcakes using the canned pumpkin. And as the cupcakes didn't use the whole can, I used the remaining pumpkin for the buttercream frosting. And they tasted GOOD. So good I might even have a go at pumpkin pie sometime (when I master gluten free pastry!). But I still need to figure out how to get the scooped remains from the Halloween pumpkin into a puree that I can cook with?

There's always next year ...

So here's the recipe for the pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin buttercream:

Pumpkin cupcakes

Ingredients
280g self-raising flour/gluten free flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
110g margarine
200g caster sugar
5 tbsp brown soft sugar
2 eggs (room temperature)
180ml milk
250g pureed pumpkin (canned is fine)


Preheat the oven to 190°C / Gas 5. Place 24 paper cases in muffin tins.

Mix together the flour, spices, salt, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda and set aside.

Beat the butter, caster sugar and brown sugar with an electric mixer in a large bowl until light and fluffy.  

Add the eggs one at a time, allowing each one to blend into the butter mixture before adding the next. 

Remove the bowl from the mixer then stir in the milk and pumpkin puree and then stir in the flour mixture, mixing until just incorporated. 

Pour the cupcake mixture into the prepared muffin cases.

Bake in the preheated oven until golden and the tops spring back when lightly pressed, about 25 minutes. Cool in the tins for 5 minutes before removing to cool completely on a wire rack.

While the cupcakes are cooling, make the icing (see below) then when cool pipe the pumpkin buttercream onto each cupcake and decorate with sprinkles or jelly worms or other suitable toppings.

Pumpkin buttercream

Ingredients
90g unsalted butter
 100% pumpkin puree
900g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Cream together the butter and the pumpkin puree in an electric mixer, until the butter is a light orange colour. The pumpkin won't totally combine at this stage so you won't be able to get a completely smooth mixture even after several minutes but don't worry about it, it will blend well once the icing sugar is added.

Beat in the vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

Add the icing sugar and mix well until smooth. I always add the icing sugar and mix by hand first to avoid clouds of icing sugar billowing out and settling across my whole kitchen. Once the icing sugar has started mixing in to the point that it doesn't fly everywhere, I then finish it off with the beater on my trusty Kitchen Aid until it's smooth and blended evenly.

Little Love Cakes creates high quality and bespoke cakes for any celebration in the Twickenham/ Teddington/ Richmond area. Visit us on Facebook at littlelovecakeslondon.

Each cake is baked and decorated using high quality ingredients and is decorated with care and great attention to detail - we know it's the little things that make a cake special and unique. 

© 2014 Nicola Noble & Little Love Cakes: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look. 

Halloween ...

Halloween fell right in the middle of half term which was fun.

We decorated the house a little and Sophie drew lots of fun pictures which we stuck in the front window. I especially love the two below with the wonderful spelling and the fact that she thinks it's "tricle treet" not "trick or treat"!

I also carved a pumpkin and for the first time ever, I managed to keep the scrapings from inside (not sure if it was just a better quality pumpkin as it did come from Waitrose!) I saved and roasted the pumpkin seeds and steamed and pureed the pumpkin flesh to use at a later date; I will be searching out some yummy things to do with it in the next week or so. Sophie helped me choose a face online and I printed it and pricked out the design with metal cocktail stick before using the grapefruit cutter to cut the face out. It turned out suitably scary and I even used the cut out mouth to make a tiara/hair fixed on the top.

Our road is becoming famous locally for the great trick or treating and we made sure we went out nice and early before all the sweets were gone. It seemed like everyone in the street with children was out and half those without children took part with bowls of sweets which was great. Both Sophie and Justin have got enough sweets to last them to Christmas, though not as many as some teenage boys I saw with a supermarket carrier bag that was overflowing - obscene really!

I took some photos of my little trick or treaters - cute and scary ...

I love how the movement in the picture below turned them into ghosts - very scary ...

And finally, I just couldn't resist including this fab Halloween picture of Snoopy, still my favourite of all cartoon characters ...

© 2012 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look

Spot the difference

I know Halloween has been and gone but I wanted to post something that made me smile so much. While looking for new die-cutters I came across the following Sizzlit die-cut of Count Dracula ...

... and it immediately brought to mind a cute photo we took of Justin last Halloween

Can you spot the difference?

Halloween success

Well, my earlier concerns about making too many skeleton biscuits were unfounded as I managed to shift over 50 biscuits in about 30 minutes!! And all my hard work was worth it when I heard a number of the trick or treaters say "oooh cookies, cool!"

Mind you, Justin managed to get through a few of them - he just couldn't understand why we were giving the biscuits to people at the door and yet he wasn't allowed them. He did manage to sneak a few in when the bowl got low enough for him to reach in ...

Too many projects?

To be honest, this morning I thought there was no chance I was going to finish the projects planned for this week but tonight I am quietly proud of myself!

The puppet theatre is finished, with curtains (courtesy of my mum and her sewing machine) and interchangeable scenery backdrops drawn by Sophie. I had a few issues on how to attach the backdrops and initially tried punching holes along the top and hooking the backdrops onto unfolded paperclips. Unfortunately, every time Sophie moved her hand into place in the theatre the backdrop lifted up and fell off the hooks. So I had to rethink it and today I put loops of paper along the back of the backdrops, cut a piece of garden cane to size and attached two loops of string to either side at the back to hang it through. Sophie hasn't tried it yet but I am pretty confident that this will hold the scenery in place.

Next on our list of projects was completing the Halloween treats. These turned out really well and Sophie even had a go at piping some of the skeletons onto the biscuits (top left of the photo). For a four and a half year old's first attempt at icing I was really impressed - I guess she must have inherited my creative genes. She also helped me flood the heads with icing and once this was dry I piped the eyes and mouths on. So our army of skeletons are ready for the trick or treaters and if 50+ kids don't descend on our house on Sunday night I will take some biscuits along to my cake decorating course on Monday night and feed my children the rest.

Finally, late this afternoon I set to and carved a jack o'lantern from our pumpkin. I found a great template online and created a happy chappy to cheer us up on Halloween. It's the first time I have used a template and I am really pleased with the end result. I remembered from previous years that it is too difficult to cut enough pumpkin flesh out of the small pumpkin for any sort of cooking so the pumpkin soup idea has been abandoned. But I have saved the pumpkin seeds and I need to decide what to do with them - roast them or leave them to dry for Sophie to glue onto pictures. 

Half term almost over and I am starting to think about the next few projects coming up. But perhaps I'll just have a few days off and enjoy the rest with Sophie back at school!

Half term fun

So it's half term and I have two craft activities planned to do with Sophie this week.

The first one is to help Sophie make some glove puppets that she has, and to create a mini theatre for her so that she can put on a show for us at the end of the week. We have managed to make two of the four puppets today and will hopefully do the other two tomorrow. That leaves us Thursday and Friday to make the theatre. I have a small box and am planning to cover it inside and out and make some sort of curtains that can be drawn across the front.

The second activity is to prepare a few things for Halloween. I have a pumpkin that I would like to carve and hopefully make something edible from the flesh (Sophie has been reading a book called Pumpkin Soup at school and has been asking me when she will get to have it so maybe that's what I'll make). I have also decided to make my own treats for the trick or treaters - I am thinking of green/red marbled mini cupcakes with gruesome icing and jelly worms coming out the top or skeleton biscuits (idea "borrowed" from a shop near us) - I have some royal icing left from last week so could use that up.

Let's see what we manage to achieve in a week ...