Festive Fall Recipes
It’s our favorite time of year again! As the weather starts turning and the leaves start dropping, it’s time for pumpkin recipes and chai lattes. We thought, why not combine these two Fall classics into one (technically two though) recipes??
In this case, we used the same honey pumpkin walnut batter and chai latte cream cheese frosting to make both pumpkin muffins AND pumpkin donuts. Two for the price of one! Our inspiration for this came from our other recipe from a few years ago, Pumpkin Chai Tea Latte Cinnamon Buns.
This recipe has been added to our article, Unique & Delicious Pumpkin Recipes for this Fall. Make sure to check it out for other delicious PUMPKIN recipes 🙂
A versatile pumpkin recipe!
This recipe makes 12 donuts + 12 muffins. However, if you only want to make pumpkin donuts OR pumpkin muffins, just half the recipe and just make 12 of them (or for instance if you have 24 muffin molds, just keep the recipe the same and make 24 muffins). It’s all up to you!
Things you’ll need for this recipe
- Baking sheets – The main items you’ll need are donut baking sheets and muffin tins. If you don’t have one, refer to the paragraph above to just make muffins or donuts.
- Piping bag – this is helpful to pipe the dough into the muffin wrappers and donut molds (however, we just cut a small hole in the corner of a ziplock back for this); you’ll also want to use this for the chai cream cheese frosting (we actually used a real piping bag for this step).
- Cooling racks – this is helpful for cooling them after cooking while preventing the outsides from drying out. Just make sure that the donuts and muffins are COMPLETELY cool before icing them (otherwise the frosting will just melt and slide off).
- A good electric hand mixer – while you could make the frosting by hand, it’s a lot easier/faster with a mixer.
- Electric can opener – again, while this is optional, we’ve found that it saves us a lot of time since it easily opens cans automatically; it’s battery powered (aka cordless) and handheld which makes it even more convenient!
Honey Walnut Pumpkin Muffins
Ok technically these would be considered cupcakes because of the frosting on top. However, they actually started out as just pumpkin muffins but after baking them, we realized that they weren’t as sweet as we thought they would be.
Therefore we just whipped up some chai tea cream cheese frosting which gave just the right amount of sweetness. The dusting of cinnamon on top also helped give an extra zing.
If you enjoy these pumpkin muffins, make sure to try out our Morning Glory Muffins and Lemon Chia Seed Strawberry Muffins and let us know what you think!
Honey Walnut Pumpkin Donuts
The donuts are great too! Just another way to enjoy this delicious pumpkin recipe. They’re great since you can have them for breakfast, dessert, or even just a midday snack. They’re also healthier than the average donut since these are baked rather than deep fried. They’re the perfect guilt-free treat for the Fall day.
If you’re into donuts, definitely check out our Apple Cider and Cardamom Donuts and Rose Petal and Raspberry Donuts.
And here, at last, is the recipe you’ve been waiting for:
Pumpkin Donuts & Muffins with Chai Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients
Muffins/Donuts
- 3 cups canned pumpkin
- ½ cup butter room temperature
- 3/4 cup honey
- ¾ cup brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 ¾ cups all purpose flour
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 3 tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp ginger
- ½ tsp salt
- ¾ cup loosely crushed walnuts
- 5 cardamom pods seeds removed and crushed
Frosting
- 8 oz cream cheese
- ½ cup butter room temperature
- 4 cups powdered sugar
- 2 tsp chai latte concentrate
- 1 tsp cinnamon
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In one bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom, and salt. In another bowl, mix together the pumpkin puree, honey, sugar, butter, and eggs. Now mix the dry ingredients into the wet ones until combined. Stir in the crushed walnuts.
- Line 12 muffin molds with muffin wrappers and grease 12 donut molds. Use a piping bag (or ziplock with a hold cut in the corner) to fill up each muffin wrapper and each donut mold to about 75% capacity. Place in oven for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
- Meanwhile, prepare cream cheese frosting by using a hand mixer to blend together the cream cheese, butter, cinnamon, and chai concentrate. Slowly incorporate the powdered sugar, cup-by-cup, until combined. Now place this bowl in fridge until ready to use.
- Once the muffins and donuts are cooked, remove them from the molds and let them cool on a cooling rack. When they have reached room temperature, use a piping bag with an attachment to top each muffin/donut with the frosting. Finally, dust with some extra cinnamon.
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