Caramel Frosted Pumpkin Mini-Muffin Cupcake Thingies

First, thanks for all of the responses to yesterday's post.  Will and I sat Jeffrey down and explained to him that while we appreciated his curiosity, he simply wasn't old enough to understand the implications and emotions and issues related to the Holocaust and, specifically, life in concentration camps.  We let him know that he could study about World War Two and the issues around it, but until we were sure that he was ready to understand the horrors, he wouldn't be reading books about it.  His response was anger and sarcasm ("Oh, yeah?  Well, how about when I'm an honor's student and I go on a trip to Europe and we visit a concentration camp and I have no idea what happened there and I look stupid?"  Sigh. Count to ten.  "If I'm letting you go to Europe, I'm pretty sure you will be ready to read about concentration camps."  "Oh.")  and we had to be very kind and firm for a good thirty minutes.  As to the nonficion/fiction thing:  Jeffrey loves fiction, but his attention span and imagination being what they are, he needs for fiction to be read aloud to him for him to really grasp it.  I've read the Harry Potter books up to book five to him and Will's reading The Ranger's Apprentice series to him.  (I have to leave the room when he does; those books are not...er...written the way I like things to be written.)  He and I are reading the first Percy Jackson book, having watched the movie this summer and he was receptive to us reading the Egyptian myth series by the same author.  We're also reading Farmer Boy out loud as a family, which will be the last Little House book we read for a while, since the Ingall's girls are getting all grown up now.  Not sure what the family book will be after this.  (We read out loud a LOT in this family.)  Suggestions?

Moving on, I had planned to write a post about how I'm having a hard time with the current chapter of the book I'm working on right now.  But the hard time revolves around race and perspective and I'm not sure if I can articulate it well enough, so instead, I'm going to write about mini pumpkin muffin-cupcake thingies.  

Yay!  Mini pumpkin muffin-cupcake thingies instead of anything remotely thought-provoking!  

Anywho, I discovered this recipe on Pinterest and immediately loved it and called it George, even though the first couple of times I had issues with it.

The first issue was because I had read somewhere that some lady who makes awesome cookies only mixes her ingredients until they're barely combined.  This led to me having giant, weird streaks in my cookies that were where the butter and brown sugar had combines.  The streaks tasted delicious, but they made for ugly-ass cookies.  

The second issue came when I realized that because there was so much pumpkin in the recipe, the cookies wound up being flimsy.  Pumpkin gives things a velvety, smooth texture, but in a cookie, this sort of translated for me into limp floppy mushes of cookie, especially after they were frosted. Tasty, but not very efficient.

I decided to fix my issues by A:  mixing everything until its mixed and B:  slopping the dough into mini-muffin tins.  

And then little acorn-capped angels of Autumn sang from the corners of my kitchen while sprinkling me with orange glitter.

Here's the recipe, adapted from this one at Let's Dish Recipes.

 

Ingredients for Cookies:

1 cup softened butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup canned pumpkin

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups all purpose flour

Ingredients for frosting:

3 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup heavy cream

1 cup confectioners' sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla 

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

pinch of salt

Let's do this:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large bowl (I used my stand mixer), cream together butter and sugars.  Cream them until they're EVENLY MIXED.  (Gah.  Still can't get over that advice.)
3. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well.
4. Stir in the pumpkin.  
5. Don't stick your finger in for a taste yet.  It's not as tasty without the spices.
6. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices.  
7. Add this sllloooowwwly to the pumpkin mixture and mix well.
8. Now go ahead and take a taste, just don't blame me if you get salmonella.  Yuuuum.
9. Spray a mini-muffin tin with cooking spray.  I suppose, alternately, you could use mini-muffin-cupcake baking papers, but I have no idea if they even make those.
10. Dollop a spoonful of batter/dough into each tin.  Aim for the magic "two-thirds full" rule of muffin/cupcake baking.
11. Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until the top of a muffin springs back when you press on it.  Or until a toothpick inserted one comes clean.  (Seriously, y'all have made muffins before, right?  You should have enough for two twenty-four count mini-muffin tens.
12. While mini-muffin-cupcake thingies are cooling, combine butter, cream, and brown sugar in a medium saucepan and heat it up over medium heat.
13. Cook this delicious mixture, stirring occasionally, until it begins to boil.  (Do NOT let it boil for very long AT ALL.  Otherwise, you get pralines, which are good, but not what you're after right now.)
14. Once it boils, remove it from the heat and stir in the vanilla.
15. Allow this to cool for a few minutes, then stir in the confectioners' sugar.
16. Spread on cooled mini-muffin-cupcake thingies.

This is a dessert that is rich and smooth and delicious and spicy and awesome AND pretty.  Now here is where I should be showing you the pictures of the mini-muffin-cupcake thingies I baked weeks ago, but I have somehow lost them.  It is a sad, sad day.

But not without benefits, because check it out:  I can totes bake a batch tomorrow and take pictures of them.  And then eat them.  Wheeee!