Super-Easy Pumpkin Cake Mix Cupcakes
It’s that time of year, friends. The leaves are falling, there’s a chill in the air, and everywhere you look, there’s something flavored with pumpkin. Pumpkin lattes, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin soup, pumpkin pasta, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin scones, pumpkin donuts, pumpkin pie, and I’ve even seen pumpkin pancakes. If you can eat it, you can probably add pumpkin to it somehow. It reminds me of the shrimp scene in Forest Gump, only, you know, with pumpkin instead of shrimp.
I like pumpkin pie, but I don’t need a whole lot of pumpkin just because it’s Autumn. As I think I have mentioned before, I’m more of a cinnamon girl once the leaves start to fall. In any case, I wanted to do something seasonal for an event recently, but I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything fancy, so I went looking for a semi-homemade treat like pumpkin cupcakes made with boxed cake mix. There were several recipes on the boards, and they mostly involved mixing some kind of cake mix with a can of pumpkin puree and maybe some nutmeg and cinnamon, then baking for twenty minutes. So I decided to give it a try.
First, I gathered the ingredients. I decided to skip a step and just use pumpkin pie spice.
Next, I mixed everything together, using two teaspoons of pumpkin spice and about a cup of pumpkin puree, more or less. (I’m not a measurer, rather an eye-baller like Rachel Ray.)
Once they had mixed for about two minutes, I took a look, but I didn’t like the consistency of the batter. It seemed a little thick for cupcakes, so I decided to add about a cup of sour cream.
Once that had mixed in, the batter was more pourable, so I filled each cupcake liner about 2/3 full (one heaping tablespoon) and baked them for twenty minutes.
Once they had come out, they were still more dense than I would have liked, but they were delicious. Looking back, I think perhaps I should have added an egg. Maybe that would have helped the cake to rise a bit more.
When they had cooled, I added cinnamon cream cheese icing and a decorative candy corn.
Icing:
- 8 oz. of cream cheese (room temperature)
- 1 stick of butter (also room temperature)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tbsp ground cinnamon
- 3 cups of confectioners sugar (roughly, you can add more or less, depending on what consistency you want from the icing.)
Place cream cheese, butter, vanilla extract, and cinnamon in mixing bowl and whip, gradually adding confectioner’s sugar until fluffy.
In the end, even though they were a little dense, everyone gobbled them up!
