Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes

My most favorite thing about the fall season are pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting. I posted my favorite recipe for them last fall, so I decided to try a different recipe for this year. This year's recipe was a Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcake with Spiced Buttercream frosting.

The chocolate pumpkin cupcake bottom recipe was pretty close to my original pumpkin cupcake but with cocoa powder added to the mix and then chocolate chips folded into the batter right before baking. This cupcake had a great chocolate flavor and you could still really taste the pumpkin as well, which was nice. The chocolate chips were a nice surprise and made them just a little more special.

For the spiced buttercream, I used my stand-by Favorite Vanilla Buttercream recipe but added a heavy handed amount of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. It turned just as good as thought it would be.

I have to admit that, although many people gave this cupcake a great review, I was not particularly a fan. I wanted the cupcake bottom, which was good by itself, to be paired with just a simple vanilla or cream cheese buttercream. The spiced buttercream was good on it's own as well, but I would have rather had it piped on top of brown sugar cupcake bottom.

I have to add that I think the best part of these cupcake are the wrappers and toppers I found at Michael's craft store. These are so cute!

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5
all components were good but needed to worked into different recipes.