Banana-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

I happily received a number of new baking books for Christmas, one of which was Betty Crocker's The Big Book of Cupcakes - a collection of over 175 cupcake varieties and decorations.

My first conquest from this book was the Banana-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes. You can find the recipe online here, but interestingly only the packet mix version. I guess if you want the "secrets" to Betty Crocker cupcake success you need to get the book! Anyway, I made these from scratch, not from a packet.

Banana and chocolate. Such a good combination.

This was my first use of chocolate buttercream. It didn't come out nearly as dark in colour as it was in the book, but it tasted good :)

I got some Runts for Christmas too (childhood nostalgia) so I could go to town on the fruit-themed decorating. This particular box only had 4 bananas in it so I had to diversify.

Bananas!


Not bananas... but still cute.

I thought the candy decorations might be hard and annoying to crunch through, but it turns out that they soften once they sit on the icing for a while. Even better :)

Christmas Snickerdoodle Cupcake Duo

Thankfully it turns out that a baking project won't necessarily fail just because it starts out looking like a batch of play-doh.

Especially not if it's helped along by the wonder of cinnamon sugar. See it sparkle.


Anyway, for the Christmas bake-off at work I decided to create a Christmas version of the already-super Snickerdoodle Cupcake Duo (which I originally posted about here). I wasn't sure I could achieve a genuinely red icing without using a toxic amount of food dye, so I opted instead to colour the snickerdoodle cookies themselves. The coating of cinnamon sugar makes them look kind of dirty and gross before baking, but fear not - they rise and spread enough to fix this.


To aid the survival of Christmas party grazers I made this whole batch into mini cupcakes. Depending on how big you make them, you can get around 40 little cupcakes and little cookies out of Bakerella's recipe. (I ended up with 42 cakes and 44 cookies - pleasantly close to even!)

Here's before decorating...

...and here's after decorating! (mostly :p)


I was relieved to end up with actual Christmas colours rather than the pink and vomit-green shemozzle which I more than half expected. Take THAT pessimism.

Merry Christmas!!!

The Cupcake Party - social decorating

So it begins. I had my inaugural cupcake decorating gathering with a bunch of friends recently. It was a good excuse to make a whole lot of cupcakes.

I ended up with: a dozen gluten and dairy free cupcakes - half chocolate, half spice and apricot...

... a dozen turkish delight...

...a dozen chocolate with Maltesers (Sarah's idea)...


... plus a half dozen plain vanilla, half a dozen plain chocolate, half a dozen chocolate with Oreos and, finally, one and a half dozen snickerdoodle cupcakes (by special request from Jess). That's... a lot of cupcakes!

By that stage my brain must have been a bit fried, because I accidentally quadrupled my butter cream recipe rather than doubling it as intended. Oops. I opted for somewhat buttery icing rather than making it up to the prescribed total volume, but there was still so much!


Herein follows some of the fantastic decorating that the ladies did :)

Some classic snickerdoodle cupcakes. (I see someone stuck a random Smartie under one of the cookies though!)

One of the girlier dozen cupcakes.

Everyone chose a few to take home and the rest were happily polished off at church the following night. Amanda couldn't make it to decorating so we kept her a couple of pretty cakes. I bought a bunch of cupcake boxes off ebay and it makes gifting a bit neater :)

My decorators hard at work. Good fun.

Playing catchup - caramel, banana, peach, choc mint and vanilla

Once you've found some recipes that you like, it's inevitable that they will be repeated! Here are some of my recent baked goods. (This is actually a sneaky mixed-up blog post to make me feel like I've caught up!)

Delicious caramel mudcake. The obvious option for when you're out of white sugar and too lazy to go and get some :p

I tried out my basket weave icing tip for the first time. This icing was too soft so you can't see the ridges, but I can see the potential.

I made banana cupcakes for work to farewell a colleague.

These are peach and cinnamon cupcakes, using the leftover cream cheese icing from the banana cupcakes. Icing keeps pretty well in the fridge so I often use the same icing a couple of times in a row to avoid wasting any.

This batch is chocolate wacky cake with mint Nuttelex icing - made for a friend whose little boy can't have eggs or dairy. The icing doesn't hold its shape as well, but still tastes fine.


Finally, a batch of vanilla with a mish-mash of icing flavours and colours.


My most reliable decoration methods are swirls and solid colour with a little star, so no doubt you'll continue seeing these. Hopefully over the Christmas break I'll get a chance to try some new things too :).

Mint chocolate cupcakes (with extras)

"Mum Goodwin's Chocolate Cake" (from Julie Goodwin's book Our Family Table) makes a nice adaptable chocolate cake base. And I find it kind of fascinating that it tastes so good when it doesn't actually contain any chocolate!

You don't add the cocoa and water mixture into the batter until the final mixing stage, so you get to see it go from what looks like a vanilla cake to suddenly very definitely chocolate!

A word of caution - if you make the full recipe as written into cupcakes you get around 40 little cakes out of it! So since this first run I've taken to halving it and getting the more respectable number of around 20, which you could stretch to an even 2 dozen if you made them a little on the light side.

It was a Friday night and I was feeling experimental so I put strawberry jam in the centre of some of the cupcakes.


In others I put little mint chocolate logs. I didn't realise until after baking that these were, sadly, a bit on the chewy side, but it still added an extra bit of pepperminty flavour.


I pressed Oreo cookies into the top of some of the cupcakes, because you can't really go wrong with the chocolate cake and Oreo pairing.

I tried out a "marshmallow icing" trick that I'd read of on a blog ages ago. When the cupcakes were nearly baked, I took them out and placed a marshmallow on top of each one, then finished baking them. Finally I put them under the grill for a few minutes to brown them a little... but these turned out to be a bit of a mess! Not at all how I imagined they would go, but maybe I baked the marshmallows too long, and they tasted fine anyway.

I had been meaning to make peppermint icing for a very long time, and finally I did it. Yum! Just add peppermint essence to your buttercream instead of vanilla or rosewater.


I enjoyed adding random extras to my cakes, but these basic swirls of peppermint on chocolate definitely looked the classiest.

I added just a dob of icing to the ones with jam or Nutella baked in (did I mention Nutella? I didn't end up eating one of them, but Nutella can't really fail as far as I'm concerned).

This chocolate cake recipe is going on my list of staple bases, and now I have 3 standard buttercream flavours (vanilla, rosewater and peppermint) to mix and match with :)

Cupcake? More like mugcake!

My new mug. I found it at the supermarket for under $5. How could I say no?

Pirate cupcake misadventure

I had some rosewater buttercream leftover from my turkish delight cupcakes and thought I should use it up somehow. Tip for the future: rosewater buttercream doesn't really go with chocolate cupcakes! But I had fun with the decorating.

Here are my cupcakes, all ready to go. I used Willow Bird Baking's "Wacky Cake" recipe base, which is egg and dairy-free. (It came out a bit dry, but maybe I over-baked it... nothing a bit of Nutella filling wouldn't fix next time!)

My Domestic Cowboy has previously bought black food colouring gel from a specialty store to make cookie icing, but we recently discovered that you can get this liquid stuff at the supermarket much cheaper! As you can see, it doesn't really make the icing black, but it had kind of an interesting silvery metallic sheen to it.

I first did a layer of blue, à la pirate-infested water. And then it was time to test out the new 3S icing tip.

Turns out 3S is great for writing and drawing! (...if you can draw :p)

Although the flavour combination was less than grand, I was quite happy with these, and with the potential for making "Eat Me" Alice In Wonderland cakes in the future with my new friend, 3S.

Arr, me hearties!