Autumn officially started today! It’s suddenly getting damn cold the last days and you even can follow how the leaves are changing their colours and falling from the trees. I rather prefer warm/hot seasons cause in cold seasons, my hands and feet quickly become freezy, even though I am wearing fluffy socks and gloves. Nevertheless, autumn is a very nice season and I look forward for some yummy specialties like chestnuts and pumpkins. As you can see I’ll already started to bake seasonal sweets with our home-planted Japanese pumpkins. The one which is growing in our garden has a pretty cute name: ほっこり姫 (Hokkori Hime means a kind of “Heartwarming Princess”). It has a green skin and an intense yellow-orange colour in the inside.

Here is my recipe for カボチャ-Cupcakes (Kabocha is Japanese and means pumpkin).

For 15 Pumpkin Cupcakes you need:

100g butter
1 egg
0.5 cup of sugar
1 cup of flour
100cc milk
2 teaspoon of baking powder
¹/₂ teaspoon of cinnamon
¹/₄ teaspoon of ground ginger
¹/₄ teaspoon of ground nutmeg

selfmade pumpkin puree
2 pumpkins (I used my Japanese princess ^^)
100g sugar
4 tablespoon of water
a pinch of salt

for the frosting
100g butter
8 tablespoon of squeezed pumpkin (selfmade)

oven baking temperature: 185C°
baking time: ~25min

Instruction:
pumpkin puree
1. Wash pumpkins, cut them into quaters and remove seeds.
2. Cook pumpkins in a pressure cooker.
3. After the cooking, the pumpkin should become soft and you can remove the green skin very easily.
4. Squeeze the yellow-orange part of the pumpkin through a sieve. (repeat the procedure several times)
5. Add sugar, water and a pinch of salt to the pumpkin and cook it well in a pot. Cupcakes
1. Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.
2. Cut butter into little pieces and add it to the flour-mixture.
3. In a separate bowl, mix together approx. 400g of the pumpkin puree (see recipe above), milk, and egg.
4. Add pumpkin-mixture to the flour-mixture. (mix mix mix)
5. Fill the dough into the baking cups
6. Bake the cakes and let them cool completely on a rack

the golden combi – also known as pumpkin spice

7. For the frosting just mix all the ingredients together and let it cool in the fridge. Use a frosting tube and put the cooled buttercream on the cakes.
8. Last but not least: Don’t leave your Cupcakes naked – give them a bit of decoration!

if you like you can half the cakes and squeeze the frosting between