Thanksgiving Gingerbread Cupcakes with Cinnamon Butter Cream

Thanksgiving this year was a busy one for us. Kyle is big on creating our own little family traditions, so this year he wanted to do a Thanksgiving dinner just the two of us. I loved this idea, but we still wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner with our families, so this meant three dinners over three days. That's a LOT of food. 

For our dinner, Kyle and I came up with the menu together and spent the day in the kitchen whipping up our dishes. We even put our turkey in brine the night before, which I will definitely do it again. The whole meal ended up being really awesome, although we cooked way too much food. 

Turkey brine

Who needs serving dishes? 

A casual Thankgiving for sure

After dinner snooze

For our family dinners, we went to each of our parents houses and both families requested that we bring cupcakes. For Kyle's family, I made squash cupcakes with maple cream cheese butter cream. You can find the recipe here. 

For my family dinner, I made Gingerbread cupcakes with cinnamon butter cream icing and a little 'acorn' decoration on top. I LOVED the cupcake flavor, but they were a tad dry. I altered this recipe a bit to improve the result. Enjoy!

Gingerbread Cupcakes

1½ cups flour
2 tablespoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1½ cups butter, softened
1½ cups sugar
3 tablespoons molasses
¼ cup milk (more or less for desired batter consistency)
4 eggs, at room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix  flour, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves in a medium bowl. In stand mixer, cream together butter, sugar, vanilla and molasses. Add eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly between. Gradually add in dry ingredients until well combined. Add in milk until batter is desired consistency. Fill a lined muffin tin ¾ full. Bake for 25 minutes. Let cool to room temperature prior to frosting.

Cinnamon Butter Cream

½ cup butter (1 stick)
½ cup vegetable shortening (Crisco)
1 tablespoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon vanilla
4-6 cups powdered sugar, sifted


Using an electric mixer, cream together butter, shortening, cinnamon and vanilla until smooth and well-combined. Gradually add in the powdered sugar, mixing well until your frosting is desired consistency. Use a pastry bag to pipe the frosting onto the cupcakes.

Acorn Decoration

Hershey kisses
Chocolate chips
Mini Nilla wafers

Pipe a small amount of icing onto the bottom of a Hershey kiss and attach to the flat side of the Nilla wafer. Pipe icing onto the flat part of the chocolate chip and attach to the other side (curved side) of the Nilla wafer. Viola! Acorn decoration complete. (Seriously the easiest 'recipe' I've every typed out...)


I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

xo
Alison