Old-Fashioned Spice Cake and Cream Cheese Frosting

And now continues my barrage of all things Fall.  When Hubby and I were in St. Louis last month, we picked up and Old-Fashioned Pumpkin Recipes book.  It goes through the process of how to prepare fresh pumpkin pulp and contains many delicious recipes!  I selected the recipe entitled Hallowe'en Cupcakes.  If you're one of those peekers and read ahead, then you can see that I only made half a batch of cupcakes and the rest into little bundt cakes using one of our wedding gifts from Grandma.  The recipe is super easy and straight forward.  Ok, actually one part was confusing to me.  The ingredients don't list butter, and yet the first direction is to cream together  the butter and sugar.  The first ingredient on the list is vegetable oil, so I just interpreted that as them meaning to say vegetable oil spread, like the Country Crock I have pictured.  The recipe still turned out deliciously!

Ingredients
1/2 cup vegetable oil (vegetable oil spread)                            
 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 cups brown sugar                                                          
 1/2 tsp ginger
2 eggs, beaten (I forgot to beat mine!  But I'm sure they thanked me for sparing them...)
1/2 tsp ground cloves
2 cups all-purpose flour
Dash nutmeg (I just shook my little nutmeg container a couple of times and called it good.)
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup whole milk (I used 2%)
1 1/2 tsp baking soda

Spice Cake
1. Preheat oven to 375 deg F.
2. Put on some good music- I love my Pandora station for the Civil Wars.  Great band.
3. Cream vegetable oil spread and sugar in mixer. (It will look like the consistency of wet sand.)
4. Beat in eggs.
5. In a separate bowl, combine dry ingredients and stir into first mix alternately with milk. (I actually poured the milk in first on accident then slowly poured the dry ingredients.  You'll want to add the dry ingredients a little at a time if you're using a mixer.  It tends to kick up dust if you put too much in at once.
6. Place paper muffin cups in muffin tins, (or spray the little bundt cups with a non-stick pray,) and fill each cup 2/3 full.  Bake for 20 minutes.

Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients:
3 oz cream cheese
3 oz butter (again, I used the vegetable oil spread...)
2 tsp vanilla
Powdered Confectioners Sugar (Enough to achieve desired consistency)
Milk (enough to thin out if need be)

1. In an a stand or hand mixer, mix together butter, cream cheese and vanilla.
2. Slowly incorporate powdered sugar.
3. Mix in milk a tsp at a time until the desired consistency is achieved.  I wanted mine to be more like a glaze, so I played around with how much powdered sugar and milk I added until I had it thin enough to drizzle over the bundt cakes. (Hubby loved the frosting!  It was his idea to make it cream cheese.  I was just going to make a simple powdered sugar, vanilla and milk glaze.  Good choice, Hubby!)