Nothing says lovin’ like fresh from the oven….

Here goes...I'm the one of the two of us who doesn't know what he's doing -- at least from a studied point of view....

My grandmother used to peel apples in one long string and my other grandmother used to lament her husband's inability to clean fish scales out of the sink once he'd processed the days catch.

So, I come from a family that cooks, but I know nothing from a book. Or, from class -- except the one J and I are taking now. So, I take baby steps.  Try things that might work, or might not.

My previous experience with creating cakes from a box worked, so why shouldn't this one?

I started with a boxed cake -- plain white. I added a package of chocolate chips, one cup of pumpkin pecan butter.

One of my friends gave me this. It rocks. A bit of pumpkin, a bit of pecan and a lot of sugar. How can you possibly go wrong?

I baked these as cupcakes. Even used the cool foil cupcake liners.

I used a cream cheese frosting (of course, from a tub) to create a cinnamon frosting. I added a 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon. Honestly, I may have used a bit more cinnamon. The frosting was a bit strongly flavored and I needed the cinnnamon to get a bit of the taste. They frosted quite nicely. See the following picture.

The texture of the tops was quite nice, but we'd expect that from a boxed cake. What I didn't expect was how hard and tough the bottoms of the cupcakes were.  They seemed dry and not at all the moist deliciousness that was the cupcake tops.  Odd that you could have two completely different textures in one cupcake.  Even odder -- if that is even a word -- is the ones in a foil liner were moist all the way through.  I assume that I over cooked them.  But, surprisingly, I didn't burn them.

Don't they just look beautiful? That's them up at the top of the blog.

Robb