8 Fall Cupcake Recipes to Make

I sank a lot of pumpkin cupcakes before I worked out what was going on.

Purée is liquid, so if you’re adding it to a recipe you have to take something else out.

Less liquid elsewhere and a slightly cooler oven, not more flour.

Once I had that part right the frosting turned out to be the easy bit.

Here are the eight I bake every fall.

1. Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes

The one everybody makes, and the one most often overmixed.

Stop stirring the second the flour disappears.

Pumpkin batter is wet enough that gluten develops fast, and an overmixed pumpkin cupcake goes rubbery in a way a plain one never does.

Cream cheese frosting, and don’t let anyone talk you out of it.

A heavy 12-cup pan bakes these more evenly than a thin one, which matters when the batter’s this wet.

2. Maple Brown Sugar Cupcakes

Brown sugar in the cake, maple in the frosting, and neither one doing the other’s job.

Use real maple in the buttercream and add it cold.

Warm syrup poured into butter splits it, and then you’re starting again.

Dark brown sugar over light, since the molasses in it is most of what makes this taste like autumn.

3. Caramel Apple Cupcakes

Grated apple in the batter, caramel over the top, chopped pecans to stop it sliding straight off.

Squeeze the grated apple dry first.

An apple is mostly water and all of it comes out in the oven.

Let the caramel cool until it’s thick enough to sit still on a spoon.

Pour it warm and you’ll end up with a puddle on the plate and a bald cupcake.

4. Chai Spice Cupcakes

Cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper.

The black pepper is the one people leave out, and it’s the one that makes it taste like chai.

Bloom the spices in the melted butter before anything else goes near them.

Thirty seconds in warm fat does more than doubling the quantity would.

5. Pecan Pie Cupcakes

Somewhere between a cupcake and a tart, and much closer to the tart.

The filling sinks as it bakes and sets into its own gooey layer, which is the entire point.

Toast the pecans first.

Raw pecans sitting in a wet filling go soft and taste of very little.

Portion the batter with a large scoop so they all rise to the same height, which matters more here than usual because the filling sinks unevenly if the cake does.

6. Sweet Potato Cupcakes

Roast the sweet potato, don’t boil it and don’t use tinned.

Roasting drives the water off and concentrates the sugar, which is exactly what a wet batter needs.

The toasted marshmallow topping wants a blowtorch, though the broiler will do it if you stand there and watch.

It’s the Thanksgiving side turned into a pudding, and it works far better than that sounds.

7. Gingerbread Cupcakes

Molasses, and the type matters more than anything else in the recipe.

Blackstrap is bitter and it will ruin them, while ordinary unsulphured molasses gives you the dark edge without the medicinal note behind it.

A sugared gingersnap on top puts something crunchy against a very soft cake.

8. Pear Vanilla Bean Cupcakes

The quiet one, and the one to make when everything else on the table is spiced.

Poached pear on top and not in the batter, since raw pear turns to water in the oven.

Real vanilla bean here, not extract.

You want to see the specks, and in a cupcake this plain there’s nowhere for a cheap vanilla to hide.

Notes on Why They Sink

A sunken middle is almost always too much liquid or too much air, and with fall flavors it’s nearly always the liquid.

Purée counts as liquid, so if you’re adding it to a plain recipe you have to take something else out.

Drop the oven a little and give them longer.

A hot oven sets the edges before the middle has finished rising, and the middle then falls into the gap.

Fill the cupcake liners two thirds full and no more.

Overfilled cases dome, crack, and sink in the center as they cool.

A digital scale matters more in baking than in anything else you cook, and this is where you’ll notice.

And leave the oven door shut for the first fifteen minutes, whatever you think you can hear going on in there.

Tips for the Frosting

Cream cheese frosting is the default across this list and it’s the one most likely to go soupy on you.

Full fat block cream cheese, never the tub.

The tub kind carries water and gums and it will never hold a piped edge.

Butter at room temperature, cream cheese straight from the fridge.

That combination is what keeps it stiff, and doing it the other way round is why frosting slides off.

A large piping tip gives you the swirl in one pass, which matters because reworking warm buttercream is what breaks it.

Frost them completely cold.

A cupcake that’s even slightly warm melts the first layer and you never get it back.

For the fall baking that isn’t cake, the fall macarons post covers ten flavors worth the trouble.

And the fall pumpkin coffee recipes are what to put next to them.