Most challenging moment: Trying to apply frosting with a palette knife (it is surprisingly difficult)
Lessons learnt: A cup of flour weighs more than a cup of sugar; ALWAYS use cupcake papers!
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I love bananas, the great thing is they're available all year round, and yet they are so undermined. Anyway I thought I'd kick things off with a banana recipe - Banana chocolate cupcakes (since Hummingbird is most famous for its cupcakes, it made sense to start with that).
In my experience, there aren't too many desserts that combine bananas and chocolate, which is sort of odd because the flavours work really well together. I tried this combo for the first time at a youth group barbecue when I was 16. These Aussie friends of mine barbecued the bananas and then buried them in Hershey's chocolate sauce. Pure heaven - and when you're 16, the calories, they don't mean a thing!
In any case, as cupcake recipes go, this one was incredibly simple. I had the batter for the banana cupcakes ready within 15 minutes...
Baker's dozen - ready for the oven :)
The cupcakes came out of the oven looking fantastic - soft, moist and utterly... well... edible! Some twisted logic compelled me to bake them without cupcake cases (even though I have 1000 cases in stock!!) and this proved to be problematic because, unlike other types of cupcakes, the banana are soft and stick to the pan even after they have cooled. But I did manage to take them out of the pan without utterly mutilating them.
The chocolate frosting was tricky - it called for 300 grams of icing sugar (that's about 3 cups!), which I thought was rather a lot. Still I wanted to stay true to the recipe so I followed it precisely. I think it was a mistake because it was an incredibly (read sickeningly) sweet frosting. Additionally there was no chocolate in it, only cocoa - and while I do appreciate that a lot of recipes use cocoa, I am a purist. Good choc frosting MUST have good quality, slightly bittersweet chocolate.
I used a palette knife to layer on the frosting (as the book suggested). This was also a mistake because i'm not really an expert at doing this kind of thing and my cupcakes fare a lot better (and look a lot prettier) when I use a piping bag. On the whole though, the cupcakes were great and the frosting was average. Combined, they were pretty good but not as good as they could have been had I used my own frosting recipe. That didn't really make a difference however because most of them were polished off by my mum and brother and I gave some to a sweet old lady from church who really appreciated them.
Here they are in pictures - Banana Chocolate Cupcakes
Photos by Stephan Andrew
Styling by yours truly
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