Greedy Girl : Banana Orange cupcakes

Cake Cake Cake...

To be honest, this isn’t really a cupcake, it’s kind-of a banana bread/muffin hybrid. I was all set to make orange cakes in the orange cups with orange butter cream, but as luck would have it, the bananas I had stored away in the refrigerator were ready to be baked. So instead of baking two things I decided to combine the banana bread with my orange cupcake idea to create banana bread infused with orange flavor, turned out pretty nice.

This is my go to banana bread recipe, the best way to use stale and over ripe bananas, but the trick here is to make sure they are really ripe…I mean inedible ripe. I found out this trick by accident, let me give you a little history lesson on my love hate relationship with bananas. Firstly I find them to be overpowering, especially in drinks, I will never put a banana in a shake because all you taste is banana. Secondly, I never eat bananas with speckles. I like my bananas just turning yellow with even a hint of green in the skin, so they have a nice tart taste and are very firm. What we use to do was make the banana bread when the bananas began to speckle, they were still edible, but just a little too ripe for anyone’s taste.

It so happened one day my mother purchased bananas from the grocery store not realizing the ones on our tree were ripe as well, so we had an abundance of bananas. And they put some on the refrigerator so they would not spoil however we totally forgot they were in there, to the tune of 3 weeks. By the time we decided to take them out they were completely black very very soft and were about to hit the garbage. I decided to peel and smell them, only to realize they may look rotten but they were actually just extremely ripe, they still smelled like bananas (in a good way) no stench or rotting or anything like that, so I washed them peeled and mashed them and made a banana bread, best bread we ever had.

The bread is very rich and dark, no need for any added coloring because the bananas were so super ripe. For this recipe I decided to just kick it up a notch and bake a few in the orange shells as a tester to see if the orange flavor would have been infused in it. And it actually worked. The banana and orange flavor work really nicely together and the cake is very moist inside the orange.

NB: In the video I double the recipe because I had 10 bananas the ingredients below are for one batch. doubling the recipe yielded 2 loaf pans and 6 cupcakes

Ingredients (printable ingredient list)

5 over ripe bananas

1 ½ stick salted butter

1 ½ cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 cup flour

½ cup buttermilk

3 oranges

Greedy tips:

Make sure to remove all the orange filling from the shells, if not the cake will be too wet on the inside
Make sure to juice what you removed from the orange, I strained mine and had a refreshing glass of orange juice.

This month of baked treats is finally over "Bless the lord oh my soul" I was dying for this day to come.

In case you missed it.....