Going Bananas

I finished a marathon. I spent four days on crutches, and have four weeks of physical therapy in front of me. There is no running for me in sight. It is affecting my ability to blow off steam, to work out my emotions, to let go of everything weighing me down, and to run off dessert.

So, I’ve started baking.

You are correct. Baking is, in fact, not the smartest hobby to take up when you aren’t able to run it off. But, here I am nonetheless with my skinny jeans mocking me from the back of the closet. Buttoning my pants aside, it has been a very fun and delicious consumer of my time. And, when I’m done with my hours of hard work, bengay is not necessary.

Last weekend, looking for any excuse to bake I looked at the bunch of very ripe bananas taking up residence on my countertop and decided to attempt a banana cupcake. And then I got bold. I decided to venture away from any one recipe that I found, and instead make my own recipe. Gasp. If you know about my Francese Fiasco, you understand that this was a potential disaster. But apparently when it comes to baking, I can handle this type of challenge because these cupcakes were pretty fan-freakin-tastic.

Using a family Spice Cake recipe as a base and tweaking it a bit to my own liking, and adding banana, here’s what I ended up with:

1 cup butter

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

4 mashed, ripe bananas

3 cups all purpose flour

3 tsp cocoa

¼ tsp cloves

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp all spice

2 cups buttermilk + 2 tsp baking soda

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and beat until blended. Sift dry ingredients together. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and buttermilk to the bowl. Beat only until well blended. Bake at 350 for about 18 minutes (for cupcakes).

These were super moist with a very light banana flavor. If refrigerated the banana flavor came out much more and tasted like ridiculously good banana bread.

The frosting. I went back and forth on a few that I wanted to try (Carmel, Cream Cheese, etc) but it always comes down to one thing –ingredients that I have on hand. The final outcome was this Honey-Banana Frosting with a little vanilla added to the mix. It was delicious, but it was more icing or glaze than frosting. The consistency was not right at all which led to adding more and more powdered sugar and a large mess.

In the end fashionable cupcakes went out the window, but they weren’t really around long enough to look at.