Lundi: Recipes

Hey, Thanksgiving is just around the corner here in the U.S. and that means piles and piles of flippin' food. Cook, damn you!

It also means no pie on my table. I can bake a cake like nobody's business but I just can't seem to master pie. So what the heck; instead of pumpkin pie, here are some awesomely easy to make cinnamon pumpkin cupcakes that can also be dressed up to look like pumpkins.

1 18.25 ounce package yellow cake mix
1 cup canned pumpkin
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup milk
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Your favorite vanilla frosting & orange food coloring

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Prepare a muffin/cupcake tin with liners (preferably ones with a holiday theme).

In a large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients for the cupcakes and mix well, either by hand or with an electric mixer, until most of the lumps are gone. Now spoon batter into the cupcake liners until each is about two-thirds of the way full. Bake on center rack about 12 to 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean.

Remove pan(s) from your oven and place on a wire rack to cool for 5 minutes. Now pull your cupcakes out of the pan and let them cool completely on the wire rack. If you're like me and you only have one muffin tin, you'll need to repeat the baking process a time or two.

When your cupcakes have cooled, combine just enough orange food coloring to your frosting to achieve a nice pumpkin-y color. Then frost them up and let the kids lick the bowl. If you're channeling Martha Stewart, consider placing a green gummy candy or a little chocolate morsel on the top to represent the stems. These can also be made for Halloween using licorice to make Jack-o-lantern faces.

Of course, for me at least, all of this is hypothetical. We're going over the river and through the woods to my mother-in-law's house for Thanksgiving. Which means there will be pie; oh yes, there will be pie. But then, there's always Christmas... Bon appetite ~

Header: Woman and Child Pouring Milk by Anne Kerr Hirschberg via American Gallery