Chocolate pumpkin cupcakes (for Halloween!)

You can't really see it in the picture unless you know they're there, but these are very special cupcakes because they have a festive Halloween-themed cupcake paper. In fact, that's pretty much the whole reason these cupcakes came into being--I have a thing for festive cupcake papers.

I found the recipe on the Internet sometime last year when I was looking for a good Halloween-themed cupcake to make, and these seemed to fit the bill--the cupcakes are chocolate and pumpkin with a lightly spiced cream cheese frosting. The cupcakes themselves actually leave a little to be desired. On the plus side, they seem to be a bit on the "healthy" side for cake, at least until you add the frosting. They don't have much butter and are made with plenty of pumpkin and yogurt. They aren't bad by any means, but they just sort of taste like generic cake--they taste of neither very much chocolate nor pumpkin and I really wanted to taste a nice chocolatey-pumpkiny cupcake. However, cream cheese frosting is pretty much always delicious, and the frosting (plus the candy corn on top) still makes the cupcakes, enough so that they're still worth making.

The human brain is a wondrous thing. Your mind can play tricks on you based on your expectations, and in the case of these cupcakes, it would only be to your advantage. Expectations can create a mindset that causes a bit of shock when they're not met--like if you were to take a swig from a glass containing milk when you're expecting apple juice. The milk would taste completely weird and even disgusting, at least until you realize it's milk. Likewise, if you expect the cupcakes to taste like pumpkin and chocolate, and you look at them and they look chocolate and you know there is pumpkin in them, you will taste at least a little pumpkin and chocolate. A fun experiment: feed them to someone, not letting them see the actual cupcake, and see what flavors they can identify. Until I conduct that little innocuous bit of psychological experimentation (I knew I got that psych degree for something!), I may just look for a truly chocolatey and pumpkiny cupcake recipe to make to go with the frosting.