Photogenic Banana Chocolate Chunk Cupcakes

"How awesome would chocolate banana cake be?" I thought to myself. "I'm so original."

Then I thought some more and decided banana cake with chocolate chips would be even better. Genius!

Then I Googled it and realised that EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD has already done that. Including me. Seriously - previous post here. Hahaha.

I used a different recipe this time anyway. You can check it out here.

But I used chocolate butter cream. Made of stuff like this (more or less):
- 65 grams of butter
- 2 cups of icing sugar
- 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- A little boiling water to help it mix together

And because it was a public holiday I took lots and lots of photos.

Isn't grated chocolate a beautiful thing? Chocolate chips are inexplicably expensive here in Japan so I actually just chopped up a couple of Meiji chocolate bars and used the chunks in the batter, keeping a bit in reserve for the shaved topping.

I got 15 cupcakes out of this recipe, but my cupcake stand has 19 spaces. Panda marshmallows to the rescue!

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 :)