Pumpkin Pie with Gingersnap Crust

Every year, I bake a pumpkin pie for my family's Thanksgiving Dinner. In my world, it's not really Thanksgiving unless you have pumpkin pie. I often experiment with the type of pie I make, and this year, I decided to make a pumpkin pie with a gingersnap crust. I absolutely love ginger, and I think pumpkin and ginger taste great together.

I used Martha Stewart's pumpkin pie recipe. I also modified a recipe that I found for a graham cracker crust, but I substituted gingersnaps instead of the graham crackers. I guessed that they would be interchangeable, and based on my results, I think this substitution worked wonderfully.

Gingersnap Crust

Ingredients:

5 oz. gingersnaps, crushed (I prefer the Triple Gingersnaps from Trader Joe's or the 365 brand from Whole Foods. Both have great ginger flavor.)
5 TBSP melted butter
3 TBSP sugar

Directions:

Pulse the gingersnaps in the bowl of a food processor until they resemble coarse crumbs.

Add the butter and sugar, and pulse until the mixture becomes clumpy and starts to stick together.

Using a rubber spatula, spread the gingersnap mixture evenly over the bottom and sides of a 9-inch pie plate. Bake at 350 degrees until edges of crust turn golden brown, 12 to 14 minutes.

Now we move on to the pie filling. Pumpkin pie is incredibly easy, because you mix all of the ingredients together in one bowl. Whisk until smooth.

Pour the filling into your crust, make sure it's spread out evenly, and then bake. Voila! Pumpkin pie!

For some reason, my photos of this pie didn't turn out very well, but I promise it's delicious! The pie filling is a fairly traditional one, but the addition of the gingersnap crust gave it a nice kick of flavor. This is a great recipe if you want a traditional pie with a slight twist.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

Life has gotten very busy lately, so I've been neglecting my blog. I hope to rectify this with some new posts over the next few days. Sorry!

Recently, I've seen a lot of people blogging and talking about making Pumpkin Whoopie Pies, which are kind of like pumpkin moon pies. This seems to be the trendy home baking dessert of the season. They sounded great to me, so I thought I'd give them a shot for a work potluck.

Martha Stewart has a recipe for Pumpkin Whoopie Pies on her web site, but her recipe involves chocolate cakes and pumpkin filling, which isn't what I wanted. I wanted to make a version with pumpkin cakes and cream cheese frosting. A friend sent me another recipe, which sounded like what I wanted. I adapted it slightly, and I'm excited that I can actually post a full recipe here!

Ingredients:

1 1/2 sticks (6 ounces) unsalted butter, 1 stick melted, 1/2 stick softened
1 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature, lightly beaten
1 cup canned pure pumpkin puree (NOT pumpkin pie filling)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon plus 2 pinches salt
1 2/3 cups flour
4 ounces cream cheese, chilled
1 cup confectioners' sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and baking powder.

3. In a large bowl, whisk together the melted butter and brown sugar until smooth. Whisk in the eggs, pumpkin puree, spices, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Using a rubber spatula, fold in the flour mixture.

3. Using an ice cream scoop or tablespoon, drop 12 generous mounds of batter, spaced evenly, onto each baking sheet. Bake until springy to the touch, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool completely.

4. Meanwhile, using an electric mixer, cream the softened butter with the cream cheese. Add the confectioners' sugar and the remaining 2 pinches salt and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla; mix on low speed until blended, then beat on medium-high speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes.

5. Spread the flat side of 12 cakes with the cream cheese frosting. Top each with another cake.

Now for the step-by-step procedure with photos:

First, I mixed together the melted butter and brown sugar until smooth.

Then I whisked in the eggs, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and 3/4 teaspoon salt.


I added the spices and pumpkin, which made the batter much thicker.

Then I folded my flour mixture (which also included baking powder and baking soda) into the liquid batter.

Step One:

Step 2 (with the flour half-way mixed in):

Step 3, with the flour completely incorporated:

I spooned the small cakes onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

And this is what they looked like when they came out of the oven.

While the cakes were cooling, I made the filling. First, I mixed together the butter and cream cheese.

Then I added the confectioner's sugar. Mmmm... creamy.

I added a generous amount of filling to the bottom half of 12 cakes, and then topped them with another cake. There was a lot of cream cheese frosting, so I didn't have to skimp.

These were fun, very tasty, and also easy to make. I would definitely make these again!

Pumpkin Cupcake-Muffins

I call this recipe Pumpkin Cupcake-Muffins, because I was trying to create something that was dense and moist like a muffin, but slightly decadent, like a cake. I was making these for a weekend brunch, so I wanted them to be more appropriate for breakfast than for dessert. My vision was to make individual pumpkin treats that had a layer of cream cheese inside, instead of on top, of the muffin.

This is one of those recipes that sounded good in theory, but didn't work out quite the way I had hoped. But in the end, they turned out great after I did some improvisational tweaking.

Martha Stewart has a great recipe for pumpkin cupcakes (minus the cream cheese) on her web site. This is the basic recipe that I used for the cakes.

I started by whisking together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and spices in a large bowl.

Next, I used an electric hand mixer to beat together the sugar, eggs, and canola oil (I substituted 1/2 cup oil instead of the butter in Martha's recipe, because I wanted these to resemble pumpkin muffins instead of cupcakes). I also added some molasses for flavor. Normally I would've used my stand mixer for this, but I was trying to keep it clean so I could use it to make the cream cheese layer.

This is what the mixture looked like after I mixed everything together. After creaming the eggs, sugar, and oil, I added the pumpkin puree, and then folded in the flour mixture. I forgot to take a photo of this step (sorry)!

Now I had to figure out how to make the cream cheese layer. I ended up using this recipe:

Cream Cheese Layer:

9 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

¼ cup granulated sugar

¼ cup brown sugar

6 TBSP real maple syrup

1 tsp maple extract

1 TBSP all-purpose flour

1 large egg

Beat all ingredients together for 2 minutes until smooth and creamy.

This is what the ingredients looked like before:

And after:In retrospect, I think this mixture needed to be a LOT thicker. Maybe there was too much maple sugar. Maybe I should have creamed the cream cheese, sugar, and eggs together first, so they could have become lighter and fluffier. The mixture tasted good, but the texture was wrong. Nevertheless, I marched onward.

I tried to layer the cupcake/muffins with a layer of pumpkin cake on the bottom, topped with a layer of the cream cheese mixture, and then another layer of pumpkin cake on top. This didn't work out so well, because the cake mixture was MUCH thicker than the cream cheese layer, so it kind of collapsed. See what I mean?I didn't give up though. I decided to go ahead and bake them, and I crossed my fingers that they would turn out well. They actually baked up fine, although the cream cheese mixture completely blended with the pumpkin cake, and they ended up looking like this.They didn't have a defining cream cheese layer, which I thought was necessary for flavor contrast. So, I decided to whip up a pumpkin cream cheese frosting to put on top of the cakes.

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting:

6 oz. cream cheese

1/4 cup pumpkin butter (I bought this from Trader Joe's)

1/4 cup confectioner's sugar

Beat all ingredients together on medium speed for 3-4 minutes until light and fluffy.

This frosting was INCREDIBLE, by the way. I love pumpkin and cream cheese. This would make a great cake frosting.

Because of the additional frosting, these ended up resembling cupcakes more than muffins, but they were still delicious!