Banana Cupcakes With Brown Butter Frosting

I’m a pretty avid baker and I’d bake everyday if I could! So today I woke up desperate to bake something but knowing that the cupboard, or at least the fridge, was bare. And me, being me, decided that I would see what delights I could rustle up from what I had hanging around in the fridge! A quick peruse of the fridge and fruit bowl showed me that I had just (literally!) enough butter to make a frosting but definitely not enough to use in cupcakes too. But I did have shortening and 2 ripe bananas! So armed with these I decided to try whip up a few cupcakes and see what happened! I had a quick browse online to see if anything popped up but nothing really did so I figured I would just throw it all together and hope for the best! I ended up with these banana cupcakes with brown butter frosting.

Banana Cupcakes

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup shortening, at room temperature

1/2 beaten large egg

1 medium banana, mashed

1/2 cup and 1/4 cup plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

1.2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, dissolved in 1 tsp hot water

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Makes 6 but easily doubled to make a full batch.

Brown Butter Frosting

1/3 cup butter

3 cups icing sugar

1 1/2 tsp lemon juice, I cheated and used bottled

2 tbsp milk

Makes enough to cover 12 cupcakes. Yay for leftover frosting!

  

1. Preheat oven to 190°c/375°F or Gas 5. Line a muffin tin with muffin cases.      

2. In a bowl, combine shortening and sugar using a hand mixer. This is much easier if the shortening is at room temperature. On the subject of the shortening, I found it easier to weigh 60g of shortening rather than try get it into a cup measure. Maybe that's just me but shortening is crumbly!

3. Add the half beaten egg and beat until combined and smooth.

4. Add the mashed banana, flour, salt, vanilla and the bicarbonate and water. Combine until smooth. The bicarbonate needs to be added to the water right before you add it to the mix. It needs to be fizzing as you add it! My batter was a little thicker than I'd have liked at this stage so I added a couple of tablespoons of milk just to thin it down a little but you might not need to do this. 

5. Using an ice cream scoop, add scoops of batter into the prepared muffin tray. Bake for 15-20 minutes. They're done when the tops are golden brown and an inserted skewer comes out clean. Cool before frosting.
6. For the frosting, put the butter in a pan and melt slowly on a gently heat until the butter is a golden brown colour. The lower the heat, the better here. If you take the butter too far then it’ll turn bitter whereas if you do it gently and slowly then the nutty flavour of the butter’ll come through and you’ll get yummy yummy frosting!

7. Transfer the melted butter to a bowl and leave to cool for a minute before adding the lemon juice and milk. Mix together. 
8. Add the icing sugar to the butter cup by cup, mixing until smooth after each addition.

9. Once combined, pipe or spread onto the cupcakes.    

Chocolate Whoopie Pies

To me, whoopie pies are a kind of inside out cupcake. Less cakey biscuit on the outside and a big splodge of frosting on the inside. Let's face it, the frosting is the best bit of any cake and a whoopie pie gives you so much more of it! Right, that’s sold 'em!

My first attempt at whoopie pies was an effort to recreate these bad boys,

Elvis Whoopie Pies

While the 'nana cake was delicious, wonderfully moist and yummy, the honey frosting was kinda lost in amongst the other flavours. I did intend to fiddle with the recipe and see if the honey frosting could be brought more into the forefront but circumstances prevented and so I decided that I would attempt a chocolate whoopie pie

The original plan was to try and create a black forest whoopie pie. I figured that I could make chocolate whoopies, add vanilla frosting around the outside of the cake to make a kinda 'pool' for some kind of cherry jam/sauce to sit in. Then I would either sprinkle the frosting and cherry filling with dark chocolate bits before squishing the two halves together or possibly create a chocolate glaze for the tops of the whoopie pies. In reality I was too lazy to go to the shops and buy the extra ingredients! And so just plain chocolate whoopies it was! The black forest whoopies will be on my list of things to make though! So watch this space!

So, on with chocolate whoopies! The original recipe is from here but I've copied it below. My notes are in blue. 

Classic Chocolate Whoopie Pies

1 2/3 cups (1/2 c and 1/4 c) all-purpose (plain for uk'ers) flour

2/3 cup (1/3 c) cocoa powder 

1 1/2 tsp (3/4 tsp) baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)

1/2 tsp (1/4 tsp) salt

4 tbsp (2 tbsp/ 1 oz) unsalted butter (salted, I always use salted butter!)

4 tbsp (2 tbsp/ 1 oz) vegetable shortening

1 cup (1/2 c) brown sugar

1 large (half a beaten) egg

1 tsp (1/2) tsp vanilla extract

1 cup (1/2 c) milk

Makes about 12 whoopie pies (I halved the recipe and got 6).

A quick note about the shortening! I was under the impression that shortening was an American ingredient and that it didn’t really have a substitute in the UK but after a quick google and an even longer, much more expensive trip to Tesco, I found this,

Which, as far as I’m concerned is the closest thing to shortening we have here so this is my first recipe testing it! On a totally unrelated note, my Irish bf informs me that the suffix –een means little in Irish so little cook shortening it is!

1. Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F) (Gas 5) and have all ingredients at room temperature. Lay out your parchment paper (Having run out of parchment paper and being too lazy to go to the shops, I used foil but greased with butter and cooking oil spray really well) on your baking trays (I used two trays).  
2. Using your mixer, beat the butter, shortening, and sugar together.

3. Add in the egg and vanilla extract.  

                  

4. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. 

5. Add half of the dry mixture and half of the milk to the wet ingredients. Mix until combined. 
6. Add in the remaining half of the dry mixture and the milk. Mix until completely combined.

7. Using a spoon or ice cream scoop, drop 1 (mini) or 2 (medium-large, what I made) tablespoons of the batter onto your parchment paper. Remember to evenly space the batter. I was able to fit twelve of the 2 tablespoons on one tray. (I used 2 trays and got 6 scoops on each tray, none of the scoops spread).

8. Bake for 10-15 minutes or until cakes spring back when lightly tapped. Remove from the oven and let cool on the tray for 10-15 minutes.

9. Gently remove the cakes from the parchment paper and allow to cool.
10. Make your favourite frosting to fill the whoopie pies!

B
     I was quite disappointed that the whoopies cracked on top. I kinda prefer a smooth top. I do wonder if the shortening had something to do with it or maybe it was my impatience or the fact that I probably slightly overcooked them!

To frost the whoopies, I just made up a frosting as I went along! Any frosting’ll work but I decided to go with just buttercream made with butter and shortening. No real recipe here. Instead I just added a blob of butter and a blob of shortening, creamed them together until they were smooth and well combined,

then just added icing sugar until I couldn’t taste the fat. I do this partly cos I’m lazy and partly cos I enjoy tasting frosting! Once all the icing sugar is combined and the frosting is smooth, its ready! If its too thick, add milk. And too thin, add more icing sugar. I kinda hit on what I thought would be a really clever shortcut idea for flavouring the frosting and added a good glug of some coffee syrups that were a totally random xmas present!

I went with caramel and I must have added a good half the bottle but I think the flavour got somewhat lost and while it seemed a smart move, it isn’t something that I’d repeat! Save them for hot chocolate I think! After that I decided that the frosting’d be much more interesting if I coloured it. So it started blue and ended up purple! I use gel colouring and a little goes a long way. So after all my fiddling I ended up with a bowl of finished frosting. 

I was planning on piping it onto the whoopies but had serious fears for the whiteness of my piping bag with all that colouring so I decided that a scoop of frosting would be more equipment friendly!

I think the purple (mauve?!) looks good against the chocolate background! Lightly press the unfrosted half onto the top,

then squish the two halves together gently  and you’re left with a plate of whoopie pies!

And there we have it! Chocolate whoopie pies with purple, kinda caramel frosting! Eat after a short stint in the fridge! 

More Soon!

L

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Hello!

Hello Everyone! I say everyone, I should probably just say Daniel! Although I imagine even he'll des(s)ert this after a while.

So I bake. A lot. Whenever I can. Mostly this is just for me because I figured a photo and recipe record of all the things I bake/cook would be quite fun to have. Any visitors (other than my boyfriend!) would just be a pleasant surprise. But no pressure!
I wouldn't say that I'm very good at baking. But I wouldn't say I'm hopeless (rare moment of high self esteem there!). Mostly I bake cupcake, although recently I have become more than a tad obsessed with whoopie pies. So prepare to see a lot of both of those! I occasionally bake dairy and free egg and having recently gone all out and brought a box of 'Ener-g' egg replacer prepare for disaster during my experiments with that.
I'm a bit of fiddler with recipes and while I tend to follow the recipe first time, I tend to rework it the second time.
I'm a messy cook and clean up usually takes twice as long as the baking. I have a really minuscule amount of patience and I have been known to turn the oven up halfway through cooking because I got bored of waiting.
I'd rather have vanilla than chocolate.
I'm obsessed with everything salted caramel.
And I always, always, always lick the bowl.

L
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