Pumpkin Spice Sour Cream Cupcakes w/ Cream Cheese Frosting

I have been a baking machine lately and I LOVE it. This is one of the many Pumpkin Spice Sour Cream Cupcake I made for people this past week:) Now, I am very big on sharing, but my baking recipes are sometimes very close to my heart and harder to share:) I will share the recipes to the Cream Cheese frosting because every baker should know a good cream cheese frosting recipe and this one is WONDERFUL!

Ingredients:
1/2c shortening--I buy it in the stick form because it is so much easier to use when baking IMHO

1Stick (1/2c) unsalted butter

1 8oz. cream cheese package

1tbsp WHITE ( or CLEAR) vanilla---now if it is just for you and you don't care about the color then you can use the regular vanilla, but your frosting with have a little color to it.

2lbs. of powder sugar ( that is a whole bag, usually)---now I do not use the whole 2 lbs, because the more sugar you add the stiff the finally product will be. You want it to be a little stiff to whole it's shape on the cupcake, but not hard!

1/2 tsp. salt

Cream the shortening, butter and cream cheese together. MAKE SURE IT IS SOFTENED....ALL OF THEM. If your butter or cream cheese has been in the refrigerator then leave it out to soften. It is extremely difficult to cream together items with hard butter or cream cheese. Then cream them until nice and smooth; you want a smooth finish to the frosting. Then add vanilla and shift together sugar and salt. Slowly add the sugar mix to the cream cheese mixture. SLOWLY....if you add all the powered sugar it will dust you with powered sugar and be very difficult for your mixer to mix right. Plus, if you do it slowly you can stop adding whenever you feel you have enough sugar. You are done, so start icing! Refrigerate any left over frosting since it is cream cheese.
Little hint if it is too stiff then add a little milk to soften it.