Celebrate Fall with a Pumpkin Cupcake Patch

I love pumpkins. I'm just going to come right out and say it. I love them so much that I may even be straying into addiction territory. Some people buy shoes--I buy pumpkins. When the first batch of them hits the grocery store in the fall it takes all my willpower to select just a few, instead of filling the cart with them. This really goes also for other squashes and gourds in the pumpkin family. Subsequent market visits are hard on me and I usually cave in and select a few more. Soon, every corner of my house is filled with pumpkins big and small, and my husband is starting to look at me funny.

The good news (for me) is that this year I've got an enabler. I have a one-year-old who seems equally enchanted with pumpkins. When we went to the store last week to pick out our Halloween selection, he ran around kissing them, indicating to me that the ones he kissed were The Chosen and that I must take them all home.

He is equally good at enabling me when it comes to my baking addiction. I suddenly have "a responsibility" to make him really cute treats for every occasion. And this is why, after several years of eying pans like this, I now own a pan that makes pumpkin-shaped cupcakes. Wilton's mini pumpkin pan makes four realistic and adorable mini pumpkins, using whatever kind of cake batter you wish. For my first round, I chose a carrot-cake batter and frosted them with orange and green cream-cheese frosting. I also like the idea of making a spice cake batter and plan to try that out on Wilton's larger pumpkin cake pan. And, of course you could use quick-bread batter as well and do pumpkin-bread pumpkins!

Like most cupcake pans, the mini pumpkin pan holds the equivalent of half a batch of cake batter. It has eight compartments, which, after you put them together, gives you four whole pumpkins. You may want to note that this means if you give a whole pumpkin to someone, that means they're eating two whole cupcakes. You may want to consider this before handing a whole one over to a toddler. Trust me.

As for decorating, they look pretty cute just glued together with frosting. Do note that when you're putting them together you might need to cut off a bit of the tops so the halves press together evenly. If you want to go all the way on decorating, you can put orange stripes in the vertical indentations and frost the stem and leaves with green frosting. I just stuck my frosting in piping bags and it was pretty easy. You can also make them look like jack-o-lanterns, which I did with a few of them.

Even with my pumpkin obsession, I did notice that the cupcakes could actually be decorated in other ways. The halves look quite a lot like lilies and would be so pretty decorated with pastel frostings. Or, turn them over and I see fun little sea anemones! More fun definitely lies ahead for my little one-year-old pumpkin-eater!

--KitchenMaus