visiting old friends!

Tomorrow Steve and I are going to visit some friends I grew up with...I've, quite literally, known them my whole life but its been years since I've seen them.

I'm happy to be going to visit.

Since it's the holiday weekend, and I don't have any gifts, I made mini cupcakes to bring and share together.

I wanted to use up the last of the pumpkin puree I had and thought the cupcakes would be a nice treat. I didn't have a recipe, so I made up my own.

I started by mixing my own flour, and made about enough for 2 batches (i'll definitely be making this again, so I'm glad I have so much flour!!)

GF spiced flour mixture
1/2 cup Brown Rice flour
1/4 cup Quinoa flour
3/4 cup minus 1Tbspn Sweet Rice flour
2/3 cup Corn flour
3 Tbspn Tapioca starch
1 1/2 Tbspn Xanthan Gum
dash salt
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves

Pumpkin Cupcakes
Preheat oven to 350
1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup pumpkin
3 eggs
1/4 cup oil
1/2 cup water
1 Tbspn vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup flour mix

Cream shortening, sugar and pumpkin. Beat eggs separately and add into mixture. Mix in oil, water and vanilla. While mixing, add in flour blend.

Drop by spoonfuls into mini muffin pans. Bake for 12-15 minutes.

As far as my first really-all-my-own-recipe-not-adapted-or-anything, I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. They are moist, light, and have good airpockets (like good bread) but are light on the pumpkin flavor. Also because I ran out of sweet rice flour, I used a little more corn flour and they are slightly reminiscent of sweet cornbread because of it, I think. All in all, though, I'm still pleased. They are good. The texture is good and the flavor is light.

I'll serve them with cream cheese frosting.