Another in the series of Abby’s cupcakes. Banana toffee cupcakes, with a peace symbol on top. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, we learnt a lot about toffee this weekend!
We tried to make toffee ourselves. Looking at recipes on the internet it looked pretty easy – mix equal portions of butter (or margarine) with sugar and heat until a certain temperature, then allow to cool. Sounds simple? Well, we burnt the first batch. And then we couldn’t be bothered trying to make another batch, so we bought some toffee bits from the grocery store. These bits we put into the cupcakes, which we made using my banana bread recipe (see here) and just added it ‘until it looked right’ (thanks Mum!). The cake part of the cupcakes were awesome.
But then Abby wanted a toffee buttercream frosting. Buttercream frosting we think we’ve got reasonably good now. I thought – well, we often melt chocolate to put that in frosting, lets try that with toffee. It didn’t work. It didn’t get creamy, it didn’t get spreadable, it just got warm and into one gooey mess. So we kind of crushed it up and put it in the frosting. And then I realized that piping frosting with ‘bits’ in it leads to the tip getting clogged, and then the bag splitting due to the pressure.
Abby’s plan was to pipe peace symbols out of the melted toffee as well. That didn’t happen (see above paragraph). So we got out the old faithful chocolate chips, melted them down and then Abby went to town piping her peace symbols. Some worked, some didn’t.
So instead of a banana toffee cupcake with toffee buttercream frosting, a banana and toffee peace symbol on top, we ended up with this:
They tasted pretty good, although we ended up taking the banana slices off the top after a day or so … would have probably been better with dried banana.
We gave some to Abby’s karate teacher for his birthday and he was quite impressed (haven’t heard whether he ate them and liked them yet, though!). Grant took some to his Bible Study and apparently one of the guys ate 3 of them. So all in all, it was a learning experience for us, and a win for everyone who had them.
Hope you enjoyed reading about Abby and my cooking at home together … I’m a little scared at the next installment from Abby’s sheet of cupcakes. Tune in to hear how we went!
Until next time, enjoy cooking at home … with kids!
Sarah