124 Calorie Pumpkin Cupcakes: tried, tested and delicious

I don't often bake but I found such a great recipe that I had to share. I've recently been using myfitnesspal.com to keep track of what I'm eating and to try and lose a few after the holidays. It's a great app/website by the way. It's free and it has a huge database of food. It makes tracking your calorie/fat/carb/protein intake a breeze. I've been using it for over a month now and I haven't abandoned it out of frustration or boredom so I think that's a good sign.


But, that's not what this post is about. Through the My Fitness Pal forum, I noticed a lot of users using and sharing recipes from a website called skinnytaste.com, a blog written by a woman named Gina. The best part about it is she calculates the nutrition info for each recipe, including the Weight Watchers points.


Even though this recipe is posted on her blog, I took my own photos so I think it deserves a post on mine as well. The original recipe is located here.


What you will need:


Ingredients:

• Duncan Hines Yellow Cake mix (vanilla or any other white cake mix would work)
• 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (if you don't have this pre-mixed spice, you can use a pinch of each ground ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and all spice)
• 1 cup canned 100% pure pumpkin
• 1 cup water

For the Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting:

• 8 oz brick Philadelphia 1/3 fat cream cheese (do not use fat free)
• 1/2 cup pureed pumpkin (canned is fine)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
• 5 tbsp packed brown sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Line a cupcake tin with cupcake wrappers.

Combine cake mix and pumpkin spice in a large bowl. Add pumpkin puree and water, mix about 2 minutes until smooth.

Fill cupcake liners 2/3 full and bake about 20 - 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

This is the part where I got nervous. Because the egg is omitted from the recipe, I wasn't sure how the cupcakes would turn out. The batter wasn't super runny like cake batter usually is. Let me assure you, these cupcakes turned out so well that none of the omitted ingredients were missed (i.e. oil and eggs). But more on that later.


For the frosting, combine the cream cheese, pumpkin, vanilla, cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice and brown sugar until smooth. You can use a spatula to ice the cupcakes or pipe them which may require making more frosting. 

The tops look a little weird but I assure you, they don't taste weird at all and you can't tell when they're iced, obviously.


And the finished product!

The best part about these cupcakes is there is no "fake sugar" like Splenda in the recipe. Not only is that stuff bad for you but you can taste it as well. These were so good that one of my friends actually called them "orgasmic". They are so moist and they have such a wonderful, warm pumpkin flavour!


Just a note* I had a lot of icing leftover - probably enough to make enough batch. I don't like my icing very thick so I only used a thin layer.