The kids are back in school, the leaves are turning and there is a chill to the air. What better time than now to bake with pumpkin?

Pumpkin spice cupcakes are just the thing to take off the chill and warm up a fall day. Even better, this recipe is an old family favorite – and probably one you’ve heard of or even used in the past.

These cupcakes are so easy to make, my toddler helped me not only mix the ingredients, but “sample” the frosting as well! (We used a store bought cream cheese frosting, but vanilla or even chocolate would be delicious.)

How to make Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes

The ingredients for the cupcakes are so simple, no measuring is involved: just a box of spice cake mix and a 15-ounce can of pumpkin puree. After preheating the oven to 350 degrees, pour the two ingredients into a large mixing bowl and stir with a wooden spoon just until moistened. Then, using an electric mixer, blend on medium speed for about 2 minutes or until mixed thoroughly.

Divide the batter evenly into paper lined cupcake cups (using an ice cream scoop for less mess and more fun – my daughter especially liked this part!) and bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pans on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then remove cupcakes to wire racks to cool completely.

Once cooled, frost and serve.

]]> http://blogs.babiesonline.com/fun-stuff/pumpkin-spice-cupcakes/feed/ 3 http://blogs.babiesonline.com/toddlers/making-cupcakes-with-baby/ http://blogs.babiesonline.com/toddlers/making-cupcakes-with-baby/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:18:58 +0000 brit http://blogs.babiesonline.com/?p=9287

My toddler has a new obsession: baking. He loves making cookies, muffins, and baking cakes. Well, what he really loves is playing with the ingredients, eating the ingredients, and generally making a mess. And eating the final result is fun too.

Today we tried cupcakes, me, toddler, and daycare baby. Toddler stands on his little chair, daycare baby is one but she’s tiny so she can sit on the counter top. They poke the flour, taste the flour, spit the flour out. Both of them want to eat all the sugar and most of the butter before it gets mixed. Toddler loves to measure things and pour things into bowls. We’d have to add 47 teaspoons of baking powder if I let him have his way. I’m just trying to ignore the little fingers in the mouth and then back into the mixing bowls, and that they have both sneezed into the sugar, and all the other baby slime that is getting into the batter…

Both of them love eggs. Toddler likes to crack eggs. We need two, he wants to put the whole box in. Baby wants to eat the eggs whole. I’m one of those city types and while I could have sworn that cows are for making skinny grande mochaccinos, I do know which end of a chicken an egg comes from and that they are not especially hygienic. I try to stop baby sucking the egg. Baby wails and throws egg on the floor. I wish we had a dog. Meanwhile toddler has been trying to crack eggs, and another one goes on the floor.

Baby twigs that we are adding lots of things to one bowl, so helps by attempting to add random objects to the cake mix – all the spoons, cheerios, the baking powder packet, etc. Toddler is trying his best to spoon the cake mix into the cupcake pan. The recipe says that it makes 12 cupcakes. After spillage, we get 10. Not bad!  The mix is slightly unevenly distributed but I don’t want to hurt his feelings or seem unappreciative of his hard work so I don’t try to even it up and we bake them like that.

Cupcakes go in the oven for 20 minutes, I clean up the egg on the floor and the cake batter and flour and wash the bowls and spoons and change everyone’s clothes. Mine included.  There’s a reason they take 20 minutes to bake, it’s the same time that it takes to clean up two small children and one mom.

Cupcakes come out, there’s giant cupcakes and teeny ones. Toddler wants “dat big one!” Ah, so that was his plan. If you only get one cupcake at lunchtime, make it one GREAT BIG cupcake.

We decorate the cakes with a Valentine’s day theme – we squidge on white frosting, add pink-and-red sprinkles, and enjoy the results of our hard work. Yum!

We’re just starting to get ready for the holidays in our house. The cards have been chosen, the gifts ordered or purchased, and the menu is planned. Unfortunately, there is still an inordinate number of projects that need to be done before we can truly be merry. While our daughter is still too young to be involved in much of the preparations, we try to include her in as many ways as we can. We’ll park her in the high chair next to the kitchen counter or table, so she can watch me fuss around the kitchen and bake bread and cookies, or she “helps” me to wrap gifts by playing with some papers and ribbon, or “helps” her dad while he puts together yet another new toy for her or her little brother to play with.

Next year we’re looking forward to having her more actively participate in all the holiday preparations. For those with older children, here are some holiday treats your little ones can be involved in making this holiday season:

• Build a gingerbread house. Do yourself a favor and purchase one of those all-in-one kits at the store, or buy it online, so you don’t have to mix frosting or bake the gingerbread yourself. Most come with the pieces already cut out and ready to be put together.
• Make buckeyes. These are quintessential holiday treats and very easy to make. Find the recipe here.
• Bake sugar cookies. Another holiday tradition in many homes, sugar cookies are easy to make and fun to decorate. In fact, they can be as elaborate or as simple as you like – simply frost and coat with colored sugars or shapes, or pipe frosting on the cookies for a more detailed look.
• Make chocolate-covered pretzel sticks. This one is easy for little hands to do. Simply dip pretzel sticks in melted chocolate and let sit on lightly greased waxed paper to dry.
• Make fruit kebabs. These are great low-fat treats and easy to make. Cut up slices or cubes of your favorite fruits – apples, oranges, pears, grapes, pineapple, etc. – and stick them on bamboo skewers. Provide yogurt for dipping, or eat them as is.

I don’t like scrapbooking. I have no desire to redecorate my home. I could care less whether I know how to create roses out of frosting on cakes. The garden in my backyard has gone untouched since we moved into the house over five years ago.

For a long time these things made me feel inadequate as a mom. Get into a conversation with a group of moms and pretty soon someone is going to start talking about something crafty, whether it’s the shade of paint they plan to use on their kitchen walls or the layout they want to use for their next scrapbook page. I listen to these conversations and try to stay focused, but I have to tell you that my mind starts to wander to other things when this stuff is the topic.

It’s not that I don’t want to be interested in these things. When I walk into a friend’s house and everything is perfectly decorated for an upcoming holiday I’m impressed and a little bit jealous. When I go to a playgroup with my kids and another mom shows up with cute little gift bags for all the kids I kick myself for not even thinking about bringing something. Do I want to have an interest in these things? Sure, I would love to.

Then again, as Popeye would say, I yam what I yam. It has only been recently that I realized that not only will I probably never start a garden in my backyard, but that I really should stop beating myself up over the lack of tomato plants flourishing within the Grand Garden of Weeds. So what if I can’t hem a skirt (and really don’t have a desire to learn)? This is me, and I’m happy to declare that I have accepted it.

I have other things to contribute as a mom. We’re not gardening, but we spend plenty of time out in nature exploring. We may not have the perfect decor within our home, but we are comfortable and things are clean. Hey, I’m not a perfect mom, but I’m the only mom my kids have. I’ll give them the best that I have and not waste my time trying to fit someone else’s expectations of what a mom should be like. It’s incredibly freeing to realize that I just don’t like certain things and that’s okay.

Yesterday, my mom and sister put on their ‘Martha Stewart’ hats. They threw a little birthday lunch in honor of my son’s and niece’s birthdays; both turn nine this month.

My mom made homemade chicken noodle soup, which I also enjoy making once the cooler weather sets in. She, however, made the noodles for the soup from scratch! She also baked muffins and cider donuts from scratch. Wow.

My sister came with her 13 month old in tow and a gorgeous chocolate birthday cake she baked, from scratch of course, decorated with mini M&Ms. She used to have her own baking/cake business. At some point during the lunch, she took out the pouch of animal finger puppets she sewed by hand, for her son to play with. She is truly domestically gifted.

Before my sis had a child of her own, she made an unbelievable birthday cake each year for her nieces and nephews (my boys included, of course). I took photos of every single one over the years, as some of them blew me away. One year, she made a three-dimensional train cake for our little train-lover. Photos of our family’s faces were somehow superimposed onto the cake; it looked like the birthday boy was the conductor and his brother, dad and mom (me) were passengers. This is just one of my sister’s many baked creations that have made my jaw drop.

She also sewed each and every Halloween costume for her nieces and nephews over the years. The green dragon costume she created for my middle son was unbelievable, with an extremely long tail spiked with scales. We received compliments each and every year about our boys? hand sewn costumes.

Now, I’m not totally inept; I’m crafty, you could say. I created a Crabby Patty for a Sponge Bob costume one year, made from Styrofoam balls, pieces of felt, an exacto knife and my handy-dandy hot glue gun.

My Crabby Patty, however, pales in comparison to my mom’s and sister’s domestic accomplishments. This Halloween, I will be creative about costume ideas and get out my glue gun if I need to but I won’t be sewing up any award-winning homemade costumes.

I can’t wait to see the costume my sister will make for her son’s first Halloween (last Halloween, he was only one month old, so that didn’t count). His ‘down on the farm’ – themed first birthday cake was unbelievable.

Will your kids be wearing homemade or store-bought costumes this Halloween? Do your homemade cakes look like they came from a bakery, like my sister’s? I hope I’m not the only domestically-challenged mom on the planet!

As the next step on my health campaign, I decided to start making sourdough bread. Sourdough is an alternative to the standard baker’s yeast that most bread is made from now. It is made from a wild yeast, rather than a cultured yeast and was traditionally used to make bread. This wild yeast contains lactobacillus, which is one of the active ingredients in yogurt.

It is thought that sourdough began with the ancient Egyptians in about 1500 BC. During the Middle Ages it was replaced by barm which is used in brewing and later by standard baker’s yeast. Sourdough is often used throughout Europe for their rye bread. It was popular in North California during the gold rush there and also in Alaska and Canada during the Klondike Gold Rush.

In order to start making sourdough bread you need a starter culture. I bought one on eBay for a couple of pounds which came complete with instructions. Once this is set up you just take some of the starter culture and mix it with the usual bread making ingredients, sugar, salt, water, margarine and flour and make your loaves. I find the whole thing incredibly easy and the children like the bread (I didn’t tell them the name until after they had tasted it in case that put them off).

Overall the bread takes much longer to make than normal yeasted bread. As a result of this it is more digestible and since many of us now have candida or yeast infections, it will help. Most anti-candida diets allow sourdough bread (except for the strictest) so it is a good replacement. For a long time now I have been making my own bread in a bread machine. However, I find this much easier because the timings are more flexible and therefore I don’t have to be there when the machine beeps. Also, I can do it in larger quantities. These days as the prices of bread and flour are increasing it also gives another option and enables us to be sure of exactly what goes into the bread. I use spelt flour with my bread which has a lower gluten level than standard wheat and therefore is less likely to cause an intolerance or allergic reaction. I also add linseeds or sesame seeds which the children eat quite happily in the bread, but would refuse if I gave them to them to eat on their own. Sourdough can be more effective than normal yeast when using flour with a lower gluten level. In addition the glycemic index is much lower and there are more nutrients.

Further Information

Sourdough and Health

Making a Sourdough Starter

Sourdough Recipes