Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Spice Muffin Recipe, and a Baby Shower Recap

Two wonderful friends of mine are both pregnant, and are both due in early 2012; and I got to help celebrate both of them this weekend with baby showers! (That’s Amanda from Mom on Review in the photo on the right!)

I decided pretty early on that I wanted to make them diaper cakes. My friend Stephanie made one for me when I was pregnant with C and I loved it!

The cake I received consisted of diapers each individually rolled and secured with a rubber band. It was gorgeous, but it looked like it took a LOT of time. Instead, I took a different approach when I made these:

1. Gather your ingredients – diapers (I used about 75 size 1 Pampers diapers for mine), three different sized cake pans for molds, two cake dowels, a cake board, a bottle, ribbon, and any other little extras (toys, socks, stickers for decoration, etc.).
2. Using packing tape, secure the bottle to the middle of the cake board.
3. Grab your largest cake pan – mine was 10″, I think – and start layering diapers around the perimeter of the pan – white side OUT to keep it nice and clean. I just kept doing this, going around and around, packing the diapers tightly to make sure the layer is secure. Just allow enough space for the bottle to fit in the middle. Once you’re happy with the amount of diapers, tie a thin ribbon snugly around the diapers to secure it, then flip the cake pan over onto the cake board, sliding the layer over the bottle.
4. Repeat this step with the medium cake layer. The second layer should cover the bottle, so this is where the dowels come in. Once you’ve placed the second layer, stick a cake dowel into each side. Once you create your top layer, slide it on top of the dowels to secure it to the cake.
5. Decorate! I tied a thick ribbon around the middle of each layer and then topped it with another thinner, contrasting ribbon. Then I tucked socks and mittens under the thinner ribbon, tied rolled up blankets to the top layer, and added other fun little things – including the babies’ names to personalize it. You can see the finished products above!

Of course, you’ve got to have actual cake at showers, too. Amanda’s shower was in the morning, so I made pumpkin chocolate chip muffins with cream cheese frosting (recipe is shared at the end of this post). It was a bug theme, so I baked the muffins in flower-themed cups, tinted the frosting yellow to look like the center of the flower, and added butterflies. I just bought cardboard stickers from Michaels, and a friend helped me hot-glue lollipop sticks to them so we could stick them in the muffins and make them look like they’d landed on the flowers.

For Jen’s shower, the napkins and plates had polka dots so I used that as reference. I just recently got a topsy turvy cake pan set, so I used two pans from it to make the cake – I think it turned out really fun! I used both chocolate and white cake mixes for this. I put a ladle of chocolate batter in the center of the pan, then white, and alternated this until it created rings of batter. The end result was a sort of marbled effect that looked nice and tasted great! I just made a standard buttercream for the icing.

It was a crazy, but fun weekend! Oh, and before I forget – here’s the recipe for the muffins (yields 24). I just used a standard cream cheese frosting (cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla).

CHOCOLATE CHIP PUMPKIN SPICE MUFFINS

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 4 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
• 1/2 cup water
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1  1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. You can bake these directly in your muffin tin, but I always use paper liners for easier clean up!
2. Mix the sugar, vegetable oil, and eggs together until well-blended. Add the canned pumpkin and water. Add in the baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt individually, mixing well after each addition. Then add the flour a little at a time, again mixing well. Stir in chocolate chips.
3. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full with batter. Bake in preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick can be removed cleanly from the center of one.