The best fall treat in Stephenville: 2025 Edition

BY ANDREW UTTERBACK

Opinion Editor / Podcast Producer

It’s that time of year again.

Fall is a time of changing leaves, dropping temperatures and copious amounts of pumpkin spice.

The latter is what fuels the hearts of fall-enthusiasts this wonderful time of year, as they welcome in the colder weather and kick off the holiday season.

If you haven’t read my fall treat article from last year, I encourage you to go do so and then return back. Major spoilers will follow regarding last year’s best treats.

Every year (this is a fairly new tradition), I recruit my friend Evan to help me run around Stephenville, buy all the pumpkin spice goodness we can find, rank them and crown a winner. Last year, we included coffee, but 2025 is the year of just baked goods.

As a reminder, for each bakery, we simply walked in and asked for their best fall item. The item had to be a limited time “fall” flavor to qualify for the competition.

Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, your 2025 contestants.

Pumpkin cream cheese muffin - King Coffee (The reigning champ)

Pumpkin maple cookie - King Coffee

Pumpkin cookie with cream cheese frosting - All-Star Cookies and Creamery

Brown butter cupcake - Lida’s Bakery

Apple pie cupcake - Red Umbrella Bakery

We first drove to all four locations to gather the treats, blasting instrumental Christmas jazz on the way. It was slightly too early for full-on Christmas music, but some instrumental classics never hurt anyone.

After gathering all of the treats, we also picked up sandwiches to ensure our hunger did not pose as a bias while taste testing and so we did not perish from the sugar intake.

After reaching Evan’s house, we realized just two judges could not make such a big decision, and in the event of a tiebreaker, we needed a third voice of objective reason. We recruited Evan’s roommate and our dear friend Micah as the third panel judge and began testing.

We started with the pumpkin maple cookie from King Coffee.

The cookie almost had a pumpkin bread-like texture. It was soft and a little crumbly with an outstanding maple taste. The icing across the top served as a nice bit of separation from the persistent maple taste and balanced out the flavor profile in a tastefully refined way.

It was a very solid start to the day’s testing.

Our second bite of dessert was the pumpkin cream cheese frosting cookie from All Star Cookies and Creamery.

The first flavor impression is the very sweet cream cheese frosting, followed by the spongy pumpkin cookie notes. The pumpkin flavor is tasted in just that – notes. Not an overwhelming pumpkin-y flavor like some of the other competitors, which leads to the cookie as a whole relying on the frosting to carry the flavor profile weight.

It’s an upper-middle range competitor and one that sets up All-Star quite nicely for their first appearance in the competition.

Speaking of new competitors, Lida’s Bakery made a strong entrance this year with their brown butter cupcake.

This was a superbly moist cupcake with fantastic textured frosting and strong—but not overpowering—notes of browned butter. There is a faint pumpkin taste to the cupcake, but cinnamon and, of course, the butter are the starting flavor elements.

The cake could no doubt stand on its own but the frosting was truly the showstopper.

Lastly, we had the apple pie cupcake from Red Umbrella.

Evan and Micah said this cupcake tasted much more like “November Fall” than “October Fall.” This kind of insight is why I sought their assistance.

Our consensus was that the cupcake was carried by the topping, which, to be fair, was phenomenal. It resembled an apple cobbler/pie filling but was a little more uniform, with less full apple chunks.

The frosting was not too sweet, which let the apple filling shine, and the cake itself carried strong notes of cinnamon. Our only knock was that the cake was a tad crumbly.

Finally, before we crowned a winner, we tasted the pumpkin cream cheese muffin from King Coffee to reestablish the bar for this year’s fall treats.

This was when the whole competition flipped upside down.

The muffin was dense. Wildly dense. Concrete-like, as described by Micah.

It had a lemon-y taste to it and a color that was far more yellow than last year’s.

The muffin was heavily carried by the cream cheese. Think along the lines of the type of work Tom Brady would have to do if he were traded to the 2017 Cleveland Browns mid-season.

This was a sad moment in our testing. The GOAT had fallen to the very bottom of the rankings. Flashbacks of Cam Newton and Todd Gurley crossed my football season-occupied mind. The past champion was dethroned, and it was not close.

There is a chance this could have been a bad batch, as last year’s pumpkin cream cheese muffin was truly exceptional.

I plan to try it again next year, so King Coffee has time to revive their champion.

For the time being though, a new champion has to be crowned.

Evan’s vote was a tie between the brown butter cupcake and the pumpkin cream cheese cookie.  Micah’s was for the maple cookie. And mine was a tie between the brown butter cupcake and maple cookie.

At the end of the afternoon, all of the desserts we tried were winners, but it was ultimately the brown butter cupcake and maple cookie that took home our top picks.

They were all worthy of your fall dollars, minus the reigning champ.

It was a hard-fought battle with new contenders, more competition and enough pumpkin spice to last us until next year’s competition.