I hope everyone had a very tasty and happy Thanksgiving! I wanted to take a few moments to share a fantastic recipe for Pumpkin Cupcakes that I made for Thanksgiving. They even claim to be “skinny,” so it was an added bonus to this minimal ingredients and easy-to-make recipe.

To make the cake, you start with four simple ingredients:

• Betty Crocker Golden Vanilla Super Moist Cake Mix
• 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
• 1 cup canned 100% pure pumpkin
• 1 cup water

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Line a cupcake tin with cupcake wrappers.

Combine cake mix and pumpkin spice in a large bowl. Add pumpkin puree and water, mix about 2 minutes.

See? Super easy.

I decided to make mini pumpkin cupcakes. I find that a small scoop like this one here, works really well to make the perfect size mini cupcakes that are all about the same size. After baking for about 15 to 20 minutes (25 seemed to be a bit too long in my oven), out came these beautiful little gems:

I even decided to add some fall fun with these cute mini cakes:

Next up, the deliciously simple pumpkin cream cheese frosting. That actually required a few more ingredients, but was still easy to make:

• 8 oz Philadelphia 1/3 fat cream cheese (do not use fat free)
• 1/2 cup pureed pumpkin (canned is fine)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
• 5 tbsp packed brown sugar

For the frosting, combine the cream cheese, pumpkin, vanilla, cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice and brown sugar until smooth. I had to use my hand mixer (since I don’t have a standing mixer) to get a smooth consistency on this. If you don’t have one, you may have to make sure the cream cheese is extra soft at room temperate and blend for a while. Good luck. I hope you succeed though, because the results were fantastic:

A army of mini cupcakes that pack a big pumpkin punch. Yum.

Click here to read the full recipe from SkinnyTaste.com.

– Posted by Cupcake Crusader, Stacy (Baltimore, MD)