In October 2009 there were two cupcake challenges that I participated in.  One was Iron Cupcake: Earth, where the theme was “music”; the other was Cupcake Hero, where the theme was “Halloween/pumpkin”.  I wanted to compete in both.  I also had a package of zombie hands and spiders cupcake toppers that I had ordered from Bake It Pretty.  Hm, how to put them to good use while coming up with an idea for both competitions….

This scary zombie cupcake was thus born.  I entered it into Iron Cupcake: Earth, and the song I chose to go with it was one of the best all-time songs ever, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.  It was perfect!  I entered it into Cupcake Hero as well.  It wasn’t very popular in the voting polls, but that’s okay because since posting it on my blog, this cupcake has received thousands of more views than any other recipe I’ve posted.  I’m surprised to see that this year, my zombie hand cupcake is once again the most popular recipe on my blog so far in October.  It was even listed in the St Louis River Front Times in the Best Twelve Halloween-Themed Cupcakes (at #9) on October 12, 2010.

Click here to view the original post with  more pictures and details.  To sum it up, the zombie hand cupcake is made up of a chocolate pumpkin cupcake filled with pumpkin buttercream.  It is frosted in a mound of chocolate frosting which is completely coated with finely crushed Oreos.  The “tombstone” is one half of an Oreo Fudgee cookie.

Okay, so that cupcake took care of my zombie hands, but I still had the spiders to use…

These are one of THE best cupcakes I have EVER had the pleasure of eating and making.  These little cuppies blew my mind.  The inspiration for the combination of flavors came from looking at one simple recipe for a caramel pumpkin pie.  A little later, I turned that idea into these pumpkin dulce de leche cupcakes.  They start with a pumpkin cupcake that is filled with dulce de leche.  They are frosted with dulce de leche buttercream and the spiderweb design is simply melted chocolate with a smidgen of shortening mixed in.  The spiders looked great on them.  And I entered these into Cupcake Hero as well, which won me a place in the throwdown with Samantha of Sweet Remedy – we ended up tying for first place!

I just can’t express in words how delicious these were, you just have to make them for yourself!

Now back in October of 2010, I still have the zombie hands and spiders, but I haven’t made any Halloween cupcakes this year.  I’m not even sure if I will at all.  Halloween isn’t so big in Australia, and making Autumn-themed food is a little out of season, as it is Spring here!  But, while I haven’t been inspired to make a Halloween cupcake, I was inspired to make an Autumn one.  I grew up in Indiana, I’ve spent a huge majority of my life there, so this time of year is naturally Autumn to me.  I wanted to make a contribution to Autumn-themed food in the Northern Hemisphere, even though I’m not there to enjoy the beautiful red, orange and yellow trees, the pumpkin pies and festivals…

So I bring you a little pumpkin cupcake with white chocolate frosting, drizzled in caramel sauce and topped off with a shard of walnut praline.  It’s the first cupcake picture I’ve ever taken outside.  It’s sort of a contrast in a way, to me, with this Autumn-themed cupcake, sitting on bright green grass.  Autumn should be chilly, the deciduous vegetation should be turning brown, but here in Sydney, it is Spring, and whatever was dormant over the Winter is now coming back to life in brilliant shades of green.  Beautiful, yes, but it’s completely backwards to me.  It’s something I will never get used to.

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This month’s Taste Of Home magazine featured quite a few cheesecake recipes and they all looked amazing to me.  It made me wish that I liked cheesecakes!  I decided to try one of the recipes; maybe my tastes had changed since I last had cheesecake.  I chose the pumpkin cheesecake, because I love pumpkin.

Now, I’ve never made a cheesecake before, so I was entering new territory!  The process of putting it together was extremely easy.  I was looking forward to having a cheesecake that was as beautiful and yummy-looking as was in the picture in the magazine.

But, it ended up being not as pretty…

The graham cracker crust was soggy, for one.  Second, the topping was too brown.  It just didn’t have the mouth-watering look like the photo of the pumpkin cheesecake slice in the magazine!

The taste of the cheesecake though was to die for!  I loved it!  I couldn’t detect the taste of the cream cheese, although my mom said she could.  To me, it tasted like a pumpkin pie.  The brown sugar and chopped walnut crunchy topping was a great contrast in texture.

By the looks of the topping, it looks like I over-baked it.  The recipe said to bake until the center was set, but I realized I didn’t know what it would look like when the center was set because I’ve never made a cheesecake before!  It was still slightly wobbly in the center, but I didn’t want to bake it any longer because the topping looked over-done.

I will definitely be trying to make this cheesecake again.  For something different at Thanksgiving this year, I would highly recommend this recipe!

Pumpkin Walnut Cheesecake
Adapted from Taste Of Home magazine, Oct/Nov 2009
Makes 12 servings

Ingredients
Crust:
2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons butter, melted

Filling:
3 packages (8 oz. each) cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 can (15 oz.) solid-pack pumpkin
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
5 eggs, lightly beaten

Topping:
6 tablespoons butter, softened
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 cup chopped walnuts

Method

Place a greased 9-in. springform pan on a double thickness of heavy-duty aluminum foil (about 18 in. square).  Securely wrap foil around pan.  In a small bowl, combine graham cracker crumbs and sugar; stir in melted butter.  Press onto the bottom and 1 inch up the sides of prepared pan.

In a large bowl, beat cream cheese and sugars until smooth.  Beat in the pumpkin, cream, cinnamon and cloves until blended.  Add eggs; beat on low speed just until combined.  Pour over crust.  Place springform pan in a large baking pan; add 1 inch of hot water to larger pan.

Bake at 325F for 1 hour.  For topping, in a small bowl, combine butter and brown sugar.  Stir in walnuts.  Carefully sprinkle over hot cheesecake.  Bake 30 minutes longer or until center is just set.  Remove springform pan from water bath.  Cool on wire rack for 10 minutes.  Carefully run a knife around edge of pan to loosen; cool 1 hour longer.  Refrigerate overnight.

My second batch of Halloween cupcakes, baked especially for October‘s Cupcake Hero, uses dulce de leche, which I chose to make in the oven.  Mine took about 1 hour, 15 minutes at 425°F.  It didn’t turn very dark before the top of the dulce de leche started to turn a little hard and dark brown around the edges, even though I had it tightly covered with foil.  I used an electric mixer to smooth out the lumps, but little tiny bits of the burnt edges remained.  It didn’t affect the taste, though; it tastes great!

These are delicious and super moist pumpkin cupcakes, filled with dulce de leche and frosted with dulce de leche buttercream.  The web is made from melted semisweet chocolate and an awesome, creepy spider from Bake It Pretty adorns each cupcake.

The chocolate web is very easy to make.  I melted 2-3 tablespoons of semisweet chocolate chips, with about 1/4 teaspoon of shortening to make the chocolate a little looser, and spooned it into a Ziploc bag.  I then cut off a very tiny sliver of the bottom corner of the bag and piped four circles on top of each cupcake.  I would have used a toothpick to draw through the circles, but I didn’t have any, so I used an uncooked stick of spaghetti that I had broken down to the length of a toothpick!  But I just simply pulled the spaghetti stick through the circles, starting from the center for each line.  Easy spiderweb decoration!

These cupcakes are quite rich, and I knew they would be before I even made them, but they are absolutely delicious.  The pumpkin and caramel go very well together.  If you’re not after so rich of a cupcake, skip the dulce de leche filling and just use the dulce de leche buttercream on top.

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Parke County is famous for its 32 covered bridges, and has festivals throughout the entire county each year to celebrate their bridges.  Throughout the county you’ll find some great seasonal foods and classic favorite foods such as baked potatoes, onion blossoms, barbecue chicken, sausages.  The smell of the air during the festival just screams FOOD at you!

Not only is food available everywhere you look at the festival, but there tents lined up at each of the festivals that are full of homemade arts and crafts.  These arts and crafts range from knitted blankets to animal skins, from children’s toys to kitchen brooms, and so on and so on.  You’ll even find more food under the tents – caramel apples, homemade fudge and cookies and sassafrass candy, to name a few.

It was in this area that I grew up, passing my local festival on my way to school each day, the smell of the food wafting in through the windows of the school bus.  On the weekend is when my mom and I would go have a look around the town square.  Now, there is always the same old stuff at the festival.  Nothing has changed since I used to go there during my school years.  But we still liked to go (or at least I did!) for the food!

One of our favorite foods was pumpkin ice cream.  I’ve never found pumpkin ice cream anywhere else except at the Covered Bridge Festival.  The ice cream basically tasted like pumpkin pie, but in ice cream form.  I loved it!  I can’t believe you can’t find pumpkin ice cream in the store, they should have it all year round!

I thought I’d never be able to have pumpkin ice cream again once I moved away from home.  So imagine my surprise when I read the inside of a Libby’s pumpkin pie mix label; it said…

Stir into softened vanilla ice cream to create your own easy pumpkin ice cream.

What!!  Unbelievable, I could have had pumpkin ice cream any time of the year and didn’t even know it!  I made the pumpkin ice cream almost immediately, adding the pumpkin pie mix until I could really taste it and the ice cream turned a lovely shade of light orange.

Incredibly, it tasted exactly like the pumpkin ice cream from the festival.  The only, and I do mean only, difference was that the festival’s pumpkin ice cream was as dark orange as the pumpkin pie mix itself.  My homemade ice cream was a very light orange.

This is the easiest ice cream you could ever make, and is the perfect solution for your leftover Libby’s pumpkin pie mix.  If you’d like to dress it up a little bit, toss some crushed Oreos on top.

This makes me realize that there should definitely be an Oreo cookie with pumpkin pie filling!

For a more exact recipe,

Easy Pumpkin Ice Cream
Adapted from Libby’s Pumpkin Pie Mix

Ingredients
2 quarts vanilla ice cream, softened
1 can (30 ounces) Libby’s pumpkin pie mix

Method
Combine ice cream and pumpkin pie mix in large bowl; stir until blended. Freeze in ice-cream maker according to manufacturer’s directions.

OR

To make recipe in home freezer, freeze mixture for 2 hours; beat with mixer for 30 seconds. Freeze for additional 2 hours or until firm.

I’ve also found that leftover Libby’s pumpkin pie mix is a great addition to oatmeal and pancakes.  :)

But these are!  This is what I created with Martha Stewart’s awesome Halloween cupcake liners, Bake It Pretty’s zombie hand toppers and a couple of Oreo cookies.

I’ll break it down for you.  First of all, if you’re making Halloween cupcakes, you’ll need these cupcake liners from Martha Stewart.  You can find them at Michael’s craft stores for about $4.

Next, I baked a batch of chocolate pumpkin cupcakes.  I’ve used this recipe before and liked the result.  Then, I whipped up some pumpkin buttercream to fill these cupcakes with.

The cupcakes are frosted with a plain chocolate buttercream, and perhaps there’s a bit too much frosting for my own liking, but I wanted a nice big round top on these.

I finely crushed 10 Oreo sandwich cookies, which ended up being way too many for 12 cupcakes; 6 probably would have been enough.  I dipped each cupcake top into the crushed Oreos to completely coat them.

For the “tombstones”, I found Oreo Fudgees made perfect-shaped tombstones.  I took the Fudgee sandwich cookies apart, scraped off the filling and stuck one side of the Fudgee into each cupcake, then stuck a zombie hand in front of the tombstones.

They’re quite spicy; I can taste a hint of ginger over all the other spices in the cupcake and filling (the filling had the most ginger).  And like I said, there’s a bit too much chocolate frosting, which makes a bit too sweet for me.  The kids love them though!  The decorations make a perfect Halloween cupcake – remember, you can find the zombie hands at Bake It Pretty’s Halloween shop!

This is my entry into Iron Cupcake: Earth for October’s theme ingredient “music” – these cupcakes are perfect for one of my favorite songs by the late Michael Jackson, “Thriller”!

Our Generous IronCupcake:Earth Prize Providers:

• The Demy™ by Key Ingredient
• Hello, Cupcake by Karen Tack & Alan Richardson
• Bella Cupcake Couture
• Cupcake Stackers by Gourmac
• The Cake Mix Doctor Returns! by Anne Byrne

I’m also entering these cupcakes into Cupcake Hero for October’s theme ingredient of pumpkin and/or Halloween.  This will be my first ever entry into Cupcake Hero!

Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes
Adapted from Country Living
Makes 12 cupcakes*

Ingredients
1 cup + 2 1/2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup + 3 3/4 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 cup + 2 1/2 teaspoons buttermilk
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 3/4 teaspoons pumpkin puree
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2.25 ounces unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 3/4 teaspoons dark brown sugar
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 3/4 teaspoons granulated sugar
2 large eggs

For Oreo decorations:
7 finely crushed Oreo sandwich cookies
6 Oreo Fudgees sandwich cookies, pulled apart and filling removed
12 zombie hand cupcake toppers from Bake It Pretty

Method
Preheat oven to 350F; line a cupcake tin with paper liners.

Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg in a bowl; set aside.

Combine buttermilk, pumpkin and vanilla in a bowl; set aside.

Beat butter and sugars together in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition, until the mixture is smooth and light.  Alternately add flour mixture and buttermilk mixture, blending well after each addition.

Divide batter evenly among cupcake liners.  Bake for 18-22 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Cool cupcakes completely, then using the cone method, fill cupcakes with pumpkin buttercream (recipe follows).

Frost each cupcake with chocolate frosting (recipe follows), then dip the frosted tops into the finely crushed Oreos to evenly coat.  Stick an Oreo Fudgee “tombstone” into the top of each cupcake, and place a zombie hand in front of it.

*The original recipe yields 36 cupcakes, but I divided the recipe into fourths, which is why the amounts of the ingredients are a little strange!

Pumpkin Buttercream
Adapted from A Year In The Kitchen
Makes enough to fill 12 cupcakes (plus some left over)

Ingredients
1/2 cup + 2 1/2 teaspoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2 tablespoons + 1 1/8 teaspoons pumpkin puree
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
8 ounces confectioners’ sugar

Method
With electric mixer, cream butter and pumpkin (mixture will look grainy).  Turn mixer to low and add cinnamon, ginger, salt and vanilla.  Slowly add 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar at a time until the buttercream is creamy and no longer separating (the mixture will look grainy if there isn’t enough sugar mixed in).

Chocolate Buttercream
Adapted from a post at Cupcakes Take The Cake
Makes enough to frost 12 cupcakes (plus some left over)

Ingredients
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
4 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup milk (plus a few tablespoons to adjust consistency)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method
Beat butter and cocoa until smooth, then add sugar 1 cup at a time, beating until smooth with each addition .  Add milk and vanilla and beat for about 3 minutes.

The recipe is a highly rated one at allrecipes.com.  I didn’t change a thing about the recipe.  I took the advice from one of the comments and did not thin out the batter with more milk; the comment stated that the batter is supposed to be thick and the addition of more milk would dull the taste of the pumpkin.  Instead, the comment said that the batter was supposed to be poured into the pan, then spread out with the back of a spoon.

The comment section has a lot of other tips and their personal changes to the recipe as well, definitely worth a read.

The recipe says it yields 6 servings, and stated that it made 12 pancakes.  Following the recipe, I used 1/4 cup of batter per pancake and ended up with 17 pancakes!  Pictured above is only 16, however, as I ate the very first one!  They taste great with a bit of butter and maple syrup.  :)

The recipe I used comes from Simply Recipes (but left out the walnuts).  After tasting the pumpkin bread today and trying to compare it to what I remember from 3 years ago, it doesn’t seem to be quite as tasty as it was back then.  I used a butternut squash instead of pumpkin – I boiled chunks of the squash, peeled off the skin and pureed the squash in a blender.  Today I used a canned pureed pumpkin.  This is the only difference.  Maybe the squash made the difference, and/or the fact that it was fresh.

It is still a nice bread, however, and I would recommend it if you’d like a change from the usual banana bread.  It’s almost like a bread version of pumpkin pie, but not quite, and it is really moist.  Also tastes nice with coffee.  :)

Anyway, I’ve seen these baked on a number of blogs lately – Martha Stewart’s pumpkin swirl brownies. Here are mine, on which I sprinkled leftover chocolate chips instead of nuts. I like nuts, but not on any foods!

The main things I did differently, besides replace the nuts with chocolate chips were using semisweet chocolate chips instead of bittersweet chocolate; baking these in an 8×11-inch pan, which required a slightly longer baking time, I noticed (by about 10-15 minutes); using only 3 eggs instead of 4 because 3 was all I had.

Now, I did use the cayenne pepper and I personally think that 1/4 teaspoon is barely noticeable, and I’m very sensitive to such spices. If you do really want to taste it, I’d suggest adding a pinch or two more.

Oh, and I’ve placed the majority of these in the freezer too. They’re too good and too unhealthy to eat all at once, so these should last us a while.

Anyway, some things to note… I did not find pumpkin pie spice, so I used the recommended spice mix on the recipe page. However I reduced the allspice to 1/4 teaspoon, as I would have done also for the cloves if I had had any. In the comments section of the recipe page a few people also note that the addition of 12 ounces of chocolate chips was too much. I could see why, so I only added a little less than 3/4 of a 12 ounce bag to the batter.

To get some nice chocolate chips on top of the cake/brownie/blondie/whatever, sprinkle a few chocolate chips on top of the batter right after you have spread it out in the pan. Otherwise all the chips will be hidden in the batter after baking.

These babies are a gooey mess of pumpkin and chocolate! So tasty, so unhealthy, so gooey! They are definitely best cut into small squares because a big square is so rich it is likely to make your belly hurt! And of course these need to be chased down with a tall glass of cold fat free milk!

For the cupcakes, I used a recipe I found from Country Living magazine online and divided the recipe into fourths. The recipe said it would make 36 cupcakes, so I intended on getting 9 cupcakes; I actually ended up with 15! I added about 1/8 teaspoon of ginger to the recipe. The cupcakes rose to a very nice dome, I was very pleased. The cake itself is fluffy and moist.

For the frosting, I found a wonderful, no, awesome, pumpkin buttercream recipe from A Year In The Kitchen, originally created for pumpkin sandwich cookies. This frosting really added the flavor to the cupcakes; it’s a perfect pairing. I’m so glad I found this recipe!

I’ll also add that my daughter greatly approves of this recipe. She normally only eats the frosting off cupcakes, but with these cupcakes she ate the whole thing! She gives them two thumbs up!