I’d (Amelia) like to call this my first recipe, but in reality it’s not. My first recipe, conceived in about five minutes when I was maybe ten, closely resembles some of the health trends of 2019. It was a baked dessert boasting an enticing ingredient list: oats and bananas. By my vague memory (and the memory of my mom), I mashed bananas and oats together with an egg and baked them. I was very excited. Until I tasted it. Despite my parents’ best efforts to compliment and eat it all, I knew it was gross. (And, upon asking mom today, I discovered that she did think it was gross after all. Parents lie too, I guess.)

This, fortunately, is a real dessert: a dessert involving chocolate, maple syrup cream cheese frosting, and pumpkin pie spice. The original recipe is from The Perfect Cake by America’s Test Kitchen, but that version tasted a little bland to me. So, I switched the spices, added chocolate chips, and topped them with Yotam Ottolenghi and Hanna Goh’s maple cream cheese frosting from Sweet. Then, they filled our hearts and bellies with the warmth of autumn, and our refrigerator with leftover frosting (no complaints, we ate it with ice cream).

PUMPKIN CHOCOLATE CHIP CUPCAKES WITH MAPLE CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
Makes 12 cupcakes

• 1 cup (5 ounces) all purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon table salt

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

• A few gratings of fresh nutmeg (or a pinch of ground nutmeg)

• 3/4 cup canned pumpkin puree

• 1 cup minus 1 tablespoon (or 7 tablespoons) sugar

• 1/2 cup vegetable oil

• 2 large eggs, room temperature

• 3/4 cup bittersweet chocolate chips

• Maple cream cheese frosting (recipe below)
  
  

Whisk the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices) together in a medium or large bowl. Then, using the same whisk if you like, mix together the pumpkin puree, sugar, vegetable oil, and eggs. With a spatula mix together the wet and dry ingredients. Stir in the chocolate chips and divide the batter between twelve standard muffin cups.

How do you do this evenly? Well, if you’re me, you use a cookie scoop, discover its too large and you’ve run out of batter to fill the whole pan, spoon a bit of all of the previously portioned cupcakes’ batter into the one that’s empty, and continue evening it out until you finally realize you’ve done the best you can and the oven can’t preheat forever. Then, bake for 17-19 minutes until a tester comes out clean. Let them cool in the pan (on a rack) for 10 minutes. Then let them cool completely out of the pan, but still on a rack, for one hour (or, if you’re me, and it’s midnight, for half an hour) Frost when they are cool.

MAPLE CREAM CHEESE FROSTING

• 7 tbsp 100 unsalted butter, room temperature

• ½ cup (packed) light brown sugar

• ⅓ cup maple syrup

• 8 ounce cream cheese, room temperature

Put butter, brown sugar, and maple syrup in the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle atttachment in place. Beat until light and airy, then add the cream cheese, one quarter at a time. Continue to beat for roughly two minutes, until smooth and thick. Spread on cooled cupcakes.