Philadelphia Pumpkin Cream Cheese

Well, well, well, what do we have here?

Hello, elusive Pumpkin Spice cream cheese!  I had heard about this flavor a while back, but hadn't seen it in the grocery store until recently.  Then again, it's not like I was camping out at the customer service desk until they carried it or anything, so who knows when it actually came out, haha. 

For my first taste, I tried out this cream cheese on a toasted bagel for breakfast.  It definitely smelled and tasted like pumpkin, so props for accuracy, but was a little too sweet for me.  I think that's probably because I'm used to eating bagels with cream cheese and lox, so having something that sweet on a bagel really threw me off.

Not to fear, it didn't all go to waste:

I baked up a batch of vanilla cupcakes and frosted them with a pumpkin cream cheese frosting!  I used a basic cream cheese frosting recipe from Bon Appetit magazine and used a Ziplock bag as a piping bag to (attempt to but clearly fail at) pipe the frosting on to the cupcakes.  I tried to go for an even swirly pattern but I think I over-mixed the frosting, because it was a little too thin to hold up its shape.

 

They were a big hit at work and I think it was a v. good use of the pumpkin cream cheese.  Alas, I still have some work to do on my frosting skills, but taste-wise these cupcakes were great!