Pumpkin Ale Cupcakes

I love summer best of all, but pumpkin anything and holiday treats help me make it through fall and winter. This fall I am on a mission to find THE perfect pumpkin cupcake. I found several on the internet this weekend, but when I stumbled on one that was chocolate I knew I had to try that one first!

Mamma graciously agreed to be my sous chef and even assisted in gathering the ingredients for a photo!

Pumpkin Ale Cupcake ingredients

I admit I was a little dubious about this recipe at first. I love pumpkin and I love chocolate, but I wasn't sure how they would be together. As pumpkin was my primary flavor objective, I decided to up the pumpkin on this recipe. Instead of just using the pumpkin ale, I also added 3/4 cup of pumpkin. I cut down the amount of sour cream to about 3 tablespoons.

I found the original recipe here. 

I've never understood exactly what adding one egg at a time really does to enhance the recipe, but nevertheless, I followed the instructions. (This time anyway.)

Yep, there's pumpkin beer in there! Yum!

And now it's getting chocolatey!

True to the recipe instructions, the batter is very runny, but don't worry!

And in we go! 

As the batter is fairly thin and runny it is easy to drip where you don't want it to. No matter, just scrap that off with your fingers (feel free to take a little taste!)

And now we bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. I often find cooking times unreliable, but 25 minutes was right on the nose for this. The recipe does say this makes 24 cupcakes. Our batch actually made 30 cupcakes. I think the secret to pretty cupcakes is to not overfill each cupcake well. This also means more cupcakes, yah!

I think these cupcakes would be great with just a basic cream cheese icing, but the buttercream icing recipe is also quite yummy.

Pumpkin spice buttercream icing ingredients

We decided to cut the icing recipe in half and we had plenty to ice each yummy cuppycake!

Yum!!!

And now for the final touch.

Aren't they beautiful?

This recipe turned out to be a lot of fun. The combination of rich dense chocolate flavor combined with the spicy pumpkin and pumpkin ale flavors was very unique. I would definitely make these again.

If you know of any pumpkin recipe I should try, please let me know!

Pumpkin spice love!