Banana Split Cupcakes

I told myself I would keep up with my cooking blog during the fall semester after neglecting to write more than a few posts over the past year, but with barely any time to cook I unfortunately didn't have time to write either. I've spent the past couple months living off 10 minute meals when I could make it home for dinner and Jimmy John's when I couldn't. Although I could write about a few of the dishes I created to survive the first semester of my Junior Year I'm more interested in showing you some of the recipes I'm making time for now that I-Core is finally over. I have big plans for the rest of winter break, but this first recipe is something I've been dying to try: Banana Split Cupcakes.

A couple years ago I made a Banana Split layer cake for my birthday and it was amazing. Banana-pineapple cake layered with chocolate ganache, chopped strawberries, and heaps of homemade whipped cream... probably one of the prettiest cakes I've made. I loved the recipe (which you can find here: http://www.howtoeatacupcake.net/2009/08/banana-split-birthday-cake-version-20.html) and figured making a cupcake version would be pretty easy. I spent nearly 5 hours baking and assembling two dozen cupcakes, but now that I have time for things like this it was SO WORTH IT.





The base for the cupcake is a banana and pineapple batter. Some people like super light cupcakes, but I've always preferred a somewhat denser cake and the texture of this cake is pretty much perfect.

The next step is a chocolate ganache, a mixture of melted chocolate and heavy whipping cream. It's hard to believe, but it gets better still.

Because the original version of this cake layers all the ingredients I was kind of making this up as I went. I decided to core each cupcake and pipe in as much ganache as I could fit, but I'm sure there are other ways to put these together.

The recipe calls for fresh strawberries but, figuring strawberries weren't going to be very great this time of year, I bought frozen ones instead. I wouldn't recommend doing so. The strawberries are a really great addition, especially since they keep the recipe truer to a "banana split," but frozen ones were hard to work with. I managed to get a layer of sliced strawberries on half of my cupcakes before I gave up and started frosting them without.

The homemade whipped cream frosting is my favorite part of this recipe. Absolutely delicious. I'm not a huge whipped cream fan, but made-from-scratch whipped cream is incredibly more delicious than the canned version. My roomie and I were eating the leftovers straight out of the piping bag.

I added sprinkles to add to the sundae idea (and cover up my somewhat shoddy piping job), but these are even better yet with a bright red maraschino cherry on top.

I recommend attacking these with a fork... but no matter how you want to eat them these are delicious, I promise!