Cupcake

For fall gatherings—everything from back-to-school to Thanksgiving—this colorful wreath makes an elegant centerpiece. The leaves are created by painting melted candy wafers on maple leaves, letting it harden, then peeling off the leaf to reveal a stunning edible replica.

These cupcakes remind me of the crisp October air and colored leaves crunching underneath my feet.

Nothing says waiting for the holiday season to end like these moist, fluffy gingerbread cupcakes. Bring them to your next familial bash and eat them as you grit your teeth and marvel at your family.

These little cakes remind me of a more sophisticated, stripped-back cupcake. Full of flavor with a dense but chewy crumb, it's like frangipane meets fairy cake. Beautifully simple to make, the biggest pitfall is not greasing your tins properly. If you don't have non-stick muffin tins or friand tins, make sure you butter them to death or you'll have eight fabulous cakes that you can’t get out of the tins.

This British recipe calls for “digestive biscuits,” but graham crackers will work just as well to infuse chocolate-filled vanilla cupcakes and toasted ‘mallow topping with that classic campfire flavor.

To make these cakes, I use the reverse creaming method, as opposed to the more common creaming method. Instead of beating air into the sugar and butter, adding the eggs then stirring in the dry ingredients, the reverse creaming method requires the butter to be rubbed into the dry ingredients, followed by milk and eggs. As well as being simpler, with fewer stages, I think this method produces a better textured, more even sponge. When you rub the butter into the flour and sugar, the flour particles get coated in fat, which minimizes gluten formation in the cake. Gluten is the essential component in bread, but in cakes too much can produce a tough and chewy sponge.

Use this easy, no-cooking-necessary glaze to ice doughnuts and cupcakes, or drizzle over anything else you want.

Studded with pistachios and white chocolate, these festive green cupcakes are better than finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

This cupcake is a twist on Babee’s Strawberry Shortbread Cookies, and is the perfect dessert for a Valentine’s Day party ora romantic dinner for two! The filling can be prepared the night before and stored in the refrigerator.

These cupcakes remind me of that old song lyric, "Make new friends, but keep the old." I've got my old friend cake and my new pal chia pudding. I like them both, and I thought it was time to bring them together. I personally love salted coconut frosting and could stand to make this one even saltier. Play around with the salt to suit your buds, just make sure to get it right before you let the pudding set in the fridge, as it will be hard to stir it after that.

This recipe makes decadent chocolate cake and delicious chocolate cupcakes. Don't skip the silky frosting, it's the best part!

Every October as kids, we loved to go pumpkin picking and buy fresh pumpkins. Our grandmother would take the pumpkin flesh and bake it in the oven with a little cinnamon and sugar, and then we’d stick it in the blender, puree it, and use it for baking. We’d bake pumpkin bread, pumpkin cake, and pumpkin pie, and we would also roast the pumpkin seeds in the oven. Really, she used every single part of that pumpkin! The thing we loved the most was our grandmother’s pumpkin cake. It was more of a cake-bread hybrid: very dense and savory yet sweet. It smelled amazing coming out of the oven. We would sometimes just eat it without any icing, hot from the oven. We’d burn our tongues because we wouldn’t even wait for it to cool!

Anybody who knows me knows that I have a soft spot for cupcakes and soy chai lattes, so combining these two creates my own piece of heaven. These cupcakes are moist, tender, and lightly spicy, thanks to the combination of ginger and cardamom. Go ahead and pair with a steaming hot chai latte...you won’t overdo it.