Pumpkin Cream Cheese Cupcakes
The cake base for these cupcakes is almost identical to my Pumpkin Snack Cake recipe. I add slightly more sugar to the cakes, and top with a deliciously creamy cream cheese frosting. I’ve also converted this recipe for my vegan friends pretty easily. For the cake recipe, sub maple for the honey and your favorite egg replacer for the eggs. However, the cream cheese frosting needs a complete overhaul for vegan/DF friends, so I’ve tried a few different methods over the years hoping to find a good substitute. My favorite dairy free cream cheese sub is to use cashew cream cheese and vegan butter or make your own!
Ingredients
1-Cup Almond butter
1-Cup pureed pumpkin
3/4 cup of coconut sugar (or brown)
1/4 cup of honey (or maple syrup)
2-tsp Pumpkin spice
1-tsp Vanilla
2-eggs (to make this vegan, sub your favorite egg replacement here-I use Bob’s Red Mill Egg Replacer)
2-tsp lemon juice
1.5tsp-Baking powder
.5 tsp-Baking soda
Cream Cheese Icing:
- 8 oz cream cheese
- ½ cup butter
- 2-4 cups powdered sugar
- vanilla
Blend cream cheese and butter until smooth. Add minimum 2 cups of sifted powdered sugar, and blend well. Add vanilla. Taste and add more sugar as needed.
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 350F.
- Mix the first 6 ingredients in a bowl until well blended. Taste and adjust flavors if desired.
- Add eggs.
- Add the baking powder, soda, and lemon juice until blended. This step should fluff up the batter to look more like a typical cake batter.
- Evenly divide the batter into 12 large muffin cups or about 30 mini muffin cups.
- Bake cupcakes for about 15 min or until you insert a toothpick and it comes out with crumbs attached, but no raw batter.
- Cool completely and pipe or swipe your icing. Once complete, store in the fridge until ready to serve.
*I do often bake ahead to save time for an event. These store really well ahead of time in the fridge for a day or so, or in the freezer for longer than that.