Guest Post: Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

I'm excited to have a guest post from my cousin Hayley today. She's graduating in December from Wichita State University, is a fantastic baker, an awesome writer, and just an all around great person. If you haven't noticed, writing and grammer were not my best subjects in school so I'm hoping she'll rub off on me a bit. I've been majorly slacking in the pumpkin department this fall so thank you Hayley for swooping in with these delicious looking cupcakes.

Enjoy (both Hayley's post and the cupcakes)!

Pumpkin is one of my favorite ingredients to use during fall. Pumpkin pie, naturally, pumpkin bread, baked pumpkin, and my mother's autumn party staple, pumpkin dip. It has become such a versatile ingredient and has been transformed to be used for so many different recipes! Why, I've even seen a pumpkin lasagna recipe before. But this little quickie that I made takes it back to the basics, Pumpkin Cupcakes. It's a pretty low-stress recipe except for when it comes to the actual icing of the cupcakes, which is not a great skill of mine. The simplicity of the recipe speaks for itself in taste, however, so enjoy!

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Nutella Swirl Blondies

To thank Kiss My Whisk's first facebook fan, I want to make her a sweet treat. I had trouble deciding what I wanted to make, but when I was at the grocery store last week the Nutella basically jumped off the shelf into my cart. So I decided I wanted the sweet treat to incorporate Nutella, because everyone loves Nutella. I opted to swirl the Nutella on top of my Mom's Blonde Brownies aka Peyton's Brownies in my family. Peyton's my nephew and when he was little my mom would never dare fly out to see him without these blondies in hand. 

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Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

For my wedding shower last year my bridesmaids requested everyone fill out a recipe card and give me one of their favorite recipes. Appropriate, right? I loved it, it fed my recipe addiction. My maid of honor, Amanda, gave me this recipe for chocolate chip banana bread and it's so tasty and moist, I've made it several times since my shower.

I always seem to have really ripe bananas laying around that usually end up going towards smoothies, banana pancakes, or banana bread. This weekend I had some realllllllly ripe bananas that were way beyond any use in smoothies, which makes them perfect for banana bread. Keep reading for the recipe.

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Chocolate Birthday Cake

As a follow up to yesterday's post about Pat's Birthday, I thought the cake tasted pretty darn good and I would use this recipe again. Next time I might try this with cupcakes instead though. We dug into it too quickly to get a good photo, so this is all I could come up with.

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Grandma's Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Baking is in my blood, my grandma and my mom are both fantastic bakers. Growing up we always had delicious cookies, brownies, cakes, and pies from scratch. My mom was always making these chewy chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, and I was always sneaking bites of the raw batter.

My husband has been begging me to make him these chocolate chip cookies for awhile now, so I did today. The only problem was that my mind was clearly already at the beach for the weekend, because I completely left out the granulated sugar! All along I was thinking that I was missing something and the dough consistency was a little off, but didn't figure it out until after I baked them. Oops. Despite this major slip up they actually still taste okay, they're just not as chewy. I definitely recommend doing it my grandma's way and including all of the ingredients, but if you are looking to cut some sugar I proved you can.  Keep reading for the recipe and have a Happy Fourth of July weekend!

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