Happy (late) Halloween everyone! This year I spent my halloween eating Pizza at a pretty cool restaurant here in Milan with my sister and two of my girlfriends. The place is called PizzaClub and if you are a little bit familiar with the city of Milan, it is located on the yellow subway at the Maciachini stop in via Carlo Imbonati. Basically you pay a fixed price at the end of the meal and you eat as much pizza as you want. One of the coolest things about this place is that waiters walk around tables with a tray full of the craziest combinations of pizza you could imagine. They also make sweet pizza, so you can get pizza with icecream, nutella, ricotta pears and chocolate, pistachio, strawberries and cream. They pretty much make any flavour you could ever imagine. I honestly love it. If you are not afraid of trying different and weird pizza, I highly recommend this place. And of course, since it was halloween we all decided to go with crazy make up on. I went for the mexican skull look and I loved it. Unfortunately this year I had no time to do more halloween blog posts like last years. But if you want to see a few of my makeup tutorials here are the links (The crazy clown, The zebra, The zombie and My Halloween themed party).

I did manage, though, to bake something special. You all know that I couldn’t let you down at least on the baking posts. So last week I went to the super market to choose a few ingredients for a new recipe, when I realised that it was almost Halloween. So, of course, I grabbed a big ol’ pumpking and went streight home. Wanna know what I made? Well of course you already know by the title, but oh well, I’m gonna tell you anyway. I baked some good ol'(sorry I love saying it too much XD) spiced pumpkin pie cupcakes. Why pumpkin spice you ask? Well while sourching for the recipe on youtube ( like I always do) I found cupcake jemma’s recipe and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. She wanted to transform a simple pumpkin pie into cupcake. So she didn’t make some boring, regular pumpkin cupcakes. Oh no, she added a disk of shortcrust pastry at the bottom of each cupcake to resemble exactly a pie. Isn’t it brilliant? And these are sooo good. So thank you jemma for the recipe. Here is the link to her video if you want to check it out. And now let’s get baking!

Ingredients:

For the cupcakes:

• 1 packet of ready-made shortcrust pastry (plus egg and sugar) (you can totally make your own if you want to. I have a recipe for the perfect shortcrust pastry right here, however i’ll cut in half the ingredients because you only need a small amount of pastry)
• 115g self raising flour
• 75g caster sugar
• 75g dark brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1.5 large eggs (or 2 small)
• 150ml vegetable oil
• 250 gr  pumpkin puree

For the cream cheese frosting:

• 230 gr cream cheese
• 50 gr of powdered sugar
• 120 ml heavy cream or whipping cream
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method:

For the cupcakes

• Start with baking the shortcrust.  Unroll the pastry and with a pastry cutter (anything round would work juast as well) cut 12 circles of pastry and put them on a baking sheet.
• To make the little leaves, cut out another circle of pastry with a smaller cutter and then cut the top and the bottom of the circle to form a little leaf shape. With the back of a knife make some impressions on the pastry to make them more leafy. Brush the leaves with half an egg and sprinkle them with brown sugar.
• Bake the shortcrust pastry for 9 to 11 minutes at 180 C°.
•  For the cake butter: Sift the flour, caster sugar, brown sugar, salt, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. Mix to combine.
• In another bowl beat the half egg with another whole egg. Then add the vegetable oil and the pumpkin puree. Whisk untill well combined.
• Add the wet ingredients to the dry mixture. Mix until combined.
• Line 12 cupcake cases with the shortcrust circles and then scoop in the cake butter.
• Bake in the oven for 20 to 22 minutes at 170 C°.

For the cream cheese frosting

• In a bowl beat together the cream cheese and sugar until combined.
• Add the heavy cream and beat on high until nicely whipped.
• Then add vanilla, whip until combined.
• Transfer frosting to a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip. Pipe out a nice swirl of frosting. Dust with cinnamon and add the shortcrust leaves on top.

XOXO

Francesca