My Little Pumpkin... Experiment

I have been trying to expand my cooking repertoire by testing a few new recipes each week. Focusing on dinner recipes, I decided to adventure out into the world of baking. Being as it's Thanksgiving week, I decided to make pumpkin cupcakes. I frosted them with cream cheese frosting and had Little R taste-test them for me. She seemed to like them... a lot. Between the two of us we polished off nine of the two dozen. I'm not going to divulge who ate the most, but let's just say I'm not too proud of myself.

The recipe was really easy. I got it from The New Cooking With 4 Ingredients book by Jean Coates.

Pumpkin cupcakes:

1 (18 ounce) package spice cake mix
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin
3 eggs
1/3 cup oil

• With mixer, blend cake mix, pumpkin, eggs, oil and 1/3 cup water. Beat for 2 minutes. Pour batter into 24 paper-lined muffin cups. Fill 3/4 full.

• Bake at 350 degrees for 18 to 20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. You might want to spread with commercial icing.

I followed the recipe close but chose to add more pumpkin because I like the taste. After baking the first batch according to the directions they turned out a bit burned, so the second batch was baked for only 15 minutes. That turned out perfect. I liked this recipe because it was easy and Little R loved them, but I didn't care for them with the icing. I think they would be better without or with a light dusting of coarse sugar crystals sprinkled on top.