Pumpkin Cupcakes with Pumpkin Swiss Meringue Buttercream

This is my second month as a member of the Martha Stewart Cupcake Club!

I was super excited to start on my Welcome Autumn: Pumpkin Series, and was thinking about doing a pumpkin cupcake when I realized that this month's cupcake was a pumpkin spice cake! How perfect! But instead of the recommended cream cheese frosting, I set out to make my own Pumpkin Swiss Meringue Buttercream. Yum!

And.....I might've gone a bit overboard with the decorations. I really just can't help myself. I'm just crazy about cupcakes, as many of you know. =)

The recipe called for super fragrant spices like cinnamon and nutmeg.

The batter was a beautiful golden color and produced beautiful golden cupcakes! They smelled delicious!


Next, onto the buttercream. I really greatly dislike super sweet frosting. And I think this is the reason why some people don't like cupcakes.

Ever since discovering the Swiss Meringue Buttercream, I've used it as a base to create buttercream of all varieties: apple, salted caramel, blueberry, and now pumpkin! It always comes out tasting like heaven, regardless of what flavor it is. I've converted many cupcake haters with it~! So many people have told me the same thing: that they hated cupcakes because they're so sweet...until they tasted mine. They end up eating the entire 2-3 inches of icing piled on top!

This buttercream is a lot more work than regular frosting but it's so worth it! It's light, fluffy, and subtly sweet. The subtle sweetness really allows for the flavors to really come out and enhance the overall taste of the cupcake. I urge all of you to try it at least once! Please go to the Salted Caramel entry for detailed instructions on how to make this buttercream.


First, prepare the pumpkin filling that goes into the buttercream. Use regular puree (not the pumpkin pie kind), and heat it up in a small sauce pan on low heat. Mix in butter and spices until it simmers and turns a deep amber brown. Chill in the fridge for about 2 hours. It needs to be cold when you use it in the buttercream.


When the pumpkin filling is ready to go, make the buttercream. (See salted caramel entry). Combine the buttercream and the pumpkin filling. Mix on low for about 30 seconds until well incorporated.


You'll get this gorgeous golden buttercream! It'll have a slight sheen to it. This will give you really beautiful swirls of frosting.

Now frost and decorate to your heart's content!

And now, I will proceed to give you a step by step description of how I decorated each one!

1. Beware of Poisonous Cupcakes!

I got these super cute cupcake liners and skull toothpicks at Michael's. They came in a package of 24. Super menacing, aren't they?

2. Haunted House with a Creepy Moon and Fence~!

I thought these were super cute!

I also got these in a package at Michael's. They come with 12 cupcake wrappers, 12 moons, and 12 haunted houses.

First, wrap the creepy fence around your cupcakes. Then, frost and insert the toothpicks!

3. Scary Spiders!

I had so much fun with these!

(click to enlarge photo)

I started out by making the cupcake wrappers. For the orange ones, I made cut outs of spiders and taped a piece of black paper on the back side, to create black spiders on the wrapper itself. (Please see these two blog posts for instructions on how to make cupcake wrappers: Cute Cupcake Wrappers and Grace's Cupcakes.)

When the wrapper itself was fully assembled, I made some black spider cut-outs and glued big white rhinestones on them.

Then I used mounting tape to stick them onto the wrapper, so that they would pop out of the wrapper, as if they really were crawling up the cupcake.

Lastly, I placed plastic spider rings on the frosting!

For the black cupcake wrappers, I used orange spider cut-outs and used green rhinestones!

4. The Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes!

I went all out on these! I wanted to create cute "pumpkin signs" to make it look like it truly was a pumpkin patch growing in someone's garden. And I wanted the signs to be fancy. They needed to be shiny, embossed, and "3-D." =) In order to make all this happen, I used the following tools/materials:

(click photo to enlarge)

Top Left: Two different ink pads- one in black, and one in "watermark." The watermark ink pad is super cool. It's basically a clear ink that darkens the color of the paper wherever you stamp it, thus creating a "watermark." Cool, huh? Also, there are two different types of embossing powder- one in clear and one in sparkling white. The clear one will bring out the color of whatever color ink pad you use. The white sparkly embossing powder will make your stamp image, well, white and sparkly!

Top Right: An embossing gun. Embossing is really cool. I'm sure you've all seen the effects of embossing, but never knew what it was called. Have you ever recieved a cool invitation, where an image or the letters were raised on the page? You run your finger across it and can feel the texture. Well, that's what an embossing gun will do for you! It makes everything super fancy.

Bottom Left: Pumpkin stamps, craft scissors, and double sided scrapbooking tape.

Bottom Right: Mounting tape and toothpicks. Mounting tape is a super thick tape that will make whatever you're sticking pop off the page.

(click photo to enlarge)

Here's how to emboss! First stamp your paper. Then, before the ink dries, quickly sprinkle the embossing powder over the stamp. Clear the excess powder off of the page- you can see that the powder has stuck to the stamped design and nothing else. Run your embossing gun over the image for about 30 seconds. The powder will melt, creating a shiny black pumpkin image that's raised off of the page! It's super cool! For the black pumpkins, I used a black stamp pad with clear embossing powder. For the white pumpkins, I used a watermark ink pad with white glitter embossing powder.

Next, I cut my stamp images out with the craft scissors and "mounted" them onto squares of black and orange card stalk. Then I added a back to them and inserted toothpicks!

Done and ready to frost~!

I was fully ready to make marzipan pumpkins...I even bought the marzipan! But I saw these at the grocery store and couldn't help but to use them! They're so cute- pumpkins for my pumpkin patch!


These cupcakes were SO delicious. In fact, I think they trump my apple cupcakes which, at the time, I thought were the best cupcakes EVER. There's been a huge debate at my house about which ones are better. Hubby insists that the apples ones were the best, while I really love these pumpkin ones! The pumpkin buttercream is so smooth and silky.. and full of sweet pumpkin goodness!


Note: It's super important to allow these cupcakes to warm up to room temperature before serving, should you keep them in the fridge overnight.


Recipes in this entry:

Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes
Pumpkin Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Click HERE for all recipes.