Another delicious recipe that doesn’t taste healthy at all.
And it’s modified from an Ina Garten recipe.
And it has cream cheese frosting.
And they’re nice and moist.
No fuss, either.
100% Whole Grain Pumpkin Cupcakes
Recipe by Texanerin Baking
Category: Dessert
Yields: 10 cupcakes
Prep Time: 10 min • Cook Time: 20 min • Total Time: 30 min
A healthified, super moist and quick version of Ina Garten’s pumpkin cupcakes recipe.
Ingredients:
- Cupcakes:
- 1 cup (130 grams) whole spelt, whole wheat pastry, or whole wheat
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 2 large eggs, room temperature
- 1 cup canned pumpkin puree (8 ounces – 225 grams)
- 1 cup (200 grams) unrefined or brown sugar*
- 1/2 cup (120ml) olive oil - I used extra-virgin
- Cream Cheese Frosting:
- 1/2 cup (1 stick – 113 grams) butter, softened
- 12 ounces (340 grams) cream cheese, softened
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon maple extract - optional
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (you can use more or less) - also optional
- 1 1/2 cups (195 grams) powdered sugar
Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 350°F / 175°C. Prepare 10 muffin tins with paper liners.
- In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg.
- In a larger bowl, whisk the eggs, pumpkin puree, sugar, and olive oil.
- Add the flour mixture to the wet mixture and stir just until combined.
- Divide the batter among the tins and bake for about 20 – 24 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
- For the frosting, beat the butter and cream cheese until soft and smooth. Add the salt, vanilla, maple extract and cinnamon. Add in the powdered sugar, 1/2 cup at a time. Beat until fluffy. Mine was pipable right away, but if yours isn’t, put it in the refrigerator until it’s to the piping consistency you like.
* With all the sugar in the frosting, I think I’ll reduce the sugar to 2/3 cup in the future.
Cupcake recipe adapted from Ina Garten’s Pumpkin Cupcakes
German bakers: I used about 500 grams of cream cheese and drained it with a Baumwollwindel until it was the consistency of American cream cheese. If you don’t drain it, the frosting will be super runny and unpipable. Still delicious, but like soup. With the fan, bake at 160°C for about 17 minutes.
22 comments on "100% Whole Grain Pumpkin Cupcakes" — Add one!
had to come back to tell you and your readers this cupcake was SO GOOD! I have been using ww flour in my recipes for awhile and this is the lightest and fluffiest cupcake i've ever made. my only change was that I replaced about 1/8 cup of ww flour for some flaxseed meal for an extra healthy kick, but otherwise made as is. wanted to also tell you that for a healthier frosting I like to replace the butter with greek yogurt and it comes out sooo good, I use that as a fruit dip too (cream cheese + greek yogurt, with vanilla and powdered sugar). thx for the recipe.
Hi Marissa! Thank you so much for taking the time to leave feedback. :) I hope it convinces the other readers to make these. Your substitution sounds great! I've start leaving the butter out of cream cheese frosting and using partly Greek yogurt instead of all cream cheese. It's not quite as yummy but still pretty darn good! Thanks for the tip and thanks again for letting me know that these worked out for you. :)
Anon – Wow, you're really creative! Thanks for sharing your changes. Now if I only had access to jello. :)
For the cranberry cupcakes I used raspberry jello. Just putting the jello dry right out of the package and added chopped dried cranberries. For the Pina Colada all I did was add pineapple and coconut. And for the star fruit I used the passion fruit juice and added the flavorless gelatin and diced star fruit and refrigerated it so that it was like normal jello, when I put the wet ingredients together I added it then mixed it all together. When adding the jello like that the cupcakes take about 22 minutes compared to 17, they don't really rise as much but they are super moist. I use jello a lot in my cupcakes to help with the different flavors.
Anon – I'm so happy to hear that the recipe is working out for you! When you make the other flavors, what do you do in place of the pumpkin? Use mashed fruit? I'd love to know what you're doing so I can try it out too! Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback. I really apprecrate it. :)
I am so in love with this recipe. I use it as a base for other flavored cupcakes. Right now I am making a piña colada cupcake along with a passion fruit star fruit cupcake. The last batch that I made were raspberry cranberry. I think this is the best recipe that I have come by so far.
Looks delicious. Would love for you to share your pictures with us over at foodepix.com.
Mouth watering cupcake! My saliva is already drooling at the side of my mouth. LOL. Better bake some to stop my drooling saliva.
I don't know how much brown sugar costs there, but I'm guessing it's expensive. You can make your own brown sugar by adding 1 tablespoon of molasses to one cup of granulated sugar. It tastes and works exactly the same. Or there's always the Asian shops, although maybe it's around the same price as Broken English.
Thanks for the link! I've spent way too much time on there just now, admiring their large selection of Reese's products.
I'll let you know if I find proper canned pumpkin anywhere! I'm always on the lookout.
They have it at KaDeWe every year for some outrageous price (I didn't even bother to look, as I wasn't lookin for it, but did notice it sitting there.)
I think I may have seen some sort of pumpkin pie filling at Broken English in Kreuzberg, too (that's where I get proper brown sugar when I run out of stuff I've brought from home). I think that Karstadt am Hermannplatz (in the basement) had it too, but that may just be muffin tins. It all sort of blends together.
Oh, and americanfood4u.de!
Guess I'll make do with the three cans I have on hand :)
Where have you found Libby's?! Hopefully not at Kaufhof for 8 euros a can. I would even be happy with the pie mix stuff. Whenever I visit Texas, I bring back almost two suitcases full of baking supplies, so I'm afraid that's how I have canned pumpkin. I've looked at Metro in Friedrichshain and they don't have it and I'm afraid that if they don't have it, normal grocery stores won't have it. Sorry I'm not much of a help. :(
I'm an American living in Berlin and was wondering where you get pure pumpkin puree here – obviously pumpkin is in season right now, and is accessible in that means, but the only canned pumpkin puree I have ever seen here is the Libby's Pumpkin Pie mix, which I don't really want since it's pre seasoned. I have a few cans of pumpkin and squash that I've brought over from the States, but would love a local source.
I'm happy that you tried and liked them! Thank you so much for leaving such nice feedback. :)
These are absolutley devine! I halved the recipe (made 5 perfect muffins) and switched around the ingredients a bit, decreasing the sugar (substituting with some stevia).
I also made a cream cheese frosting but used the light tub variety, vanilla, a small amount of icing sugar and stevia to sweeten.
Perfect, moist muffins with a light smear of cream cheese frosting and sprinkle of walnuts.
YES PLEASE!
Hi Olivia! I hope they turn out the way you hope they will. Let me know how you like them! Thanks a bunch for stopping by. :)
Sent here by Cookies and Cups
and absolutely LOVE this blog,
cant wait to try some of the recipes :)
Hey cookies and cups! If you're not used to (or think it's absolutely disgusting like I used to) whole grain baking, you should really try these cupcakes. They really honestly don't taste like they're whole wheat! But keep the sugar in the cupcakes at 1 cup if you're not used to reduced sugar stuff. Thanks for the comment! :)
What a great site!! So glad you commented on mine and it led me back! You might just convert me to whole wheat yet :)
Hi Miryam! I think so, too. Sometimes it's interesting to see how many calories you're normally eating per day, but I don't worry about it. I just try to make sure to eat whole grains when possible and reduce the sugar. And use olive oil instead of butter. So basically everything you do. :)
I just made some last week, of course they are gone, they were really good!!.
What a great idea of using a calorie count analyzer. I guess for those that are trying to count their calories it would be very effective. I never have counted calories, but then again, if your diet is healthy I guess you won't need to do that ;-)
I used the Caloriecount recipe analyzer for the cupcake part (also using 2/3 cup sugar). It got a B-. I think that's quite good for a dessert!
- 193 calories
- 12.1 grams fat (which comes from the olive oil)
- 2.3 grams fiber
- 10.6 grams sugar (which is unrefined)
- Vitamin A 77% GDA
To me, icing is obviously unhealthy. You can't make healthy icing with fake sugar and fake butter and fat-free cream cheese. So if you want to skip the icing, I totally understand. Just sprinkle some cinnamon sugar on top of the cupcakes before baking. They're sweet enough and lovely that way. The cream cheese icing is just something special.
I just did the calculations on this recipe using SparkRecipes.com and if you use exactly what you said (including the 2/3 cup sugar instead of 1 cup and low fat cream cheese instead of regular) each cupcake is still 442 calories…and 27 grams of fat. Not really healthy :-/ I wish they were, because they sound delicious!