Banoffee Cupcakes

So these are the first i've ever made of this flavour (as are most of them). Now, im not a huge fan of bananas, but i bake to please and i know a lot of people are a fan of the banoffee flavour. Using a recipe from the hummingbird bakery book "Cake Days", i followed their recipe for a light vanilla sponge with mashed banana and a light, creamy caramel custard topping.

But wait-

Isn't banoffee, banana and toffee?? ...and... and not, well, caramel??

Oh well.

The recipe was pretty standard to follow, with a basic vanilla sponge mix but with the mashed banana, it managed to bulk up the mixture quite a bit, so i was able to squeeze out 20 cupcakes, as opposed to my usual 14.

I watched like a hawk over my sponges in the oven, careful not to over-bake and not under-do like i did with my last batch of cupcakes (see boston creams II).. i also carefully followed the recipe for the cream caramel topping which was similar to the custard filling for the boston creams, except this topping had whipped double cream in it (yum!) so it turned out not quite as sweet and sickly as i thought and was actually quite light and airy with a hint of caramel sweetness running through. Very nice.

However, there was only just, JUST, enough topping to cover the 20 cupcakes. Since usually when i follow the recipe for frosting, i always have MASSES left (even when piping), so this time i made 3/5 (3 fifths) of the amount stated and managed to pipe 13 and then used a palette knife to smear the others with the little i had left. I always have trouble eyeing how much frosting to make... maybe 4/5ths is the magic number/division.

I piped the topping on with a homemade piping bag made out of a sandwich bag (first time!) just so that i could have the right size round hole i wanted. I think, for the consistency of this topping, it wasn't stable enough for a fancy star style pipe, so i thought a round pipe would be fine to give it the right touch. I then just decorated with a light sprinkling of chocolate pieces (i would have preferred grated chocolate but i dont have any *bigsadface*) to give it that "banana and something naughty" feel. (oo-err!!)..

So yeah, anyway, these turned out quite nicely. 3 of my housemates said it was their favourite so far (they say that every time so i dont know whether to believe them), as they weren't sickly so they could happily eat the whole cupcake and not feel so guilty, and there was enough banana in there to keep all the little monkeys happy :)

Have a look: