Go to hell, Black and Decker

I hate Black and Decker.

I decided to try something a little more childish in my cupcake makings. I've been aiming for fancy lately, and I thought it would be fun to do something I would've wanted when I was a kid. And what's more childish than. . . peanut butter! Delicious!

My plan was to do a peanut butter and banana cake and make a honey frosting to go on top. Something light to balance what I figured would be a pretty heavy cake.

Here we go!

Cake Recipe:

1 3/4 cups self-rising flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 large eggs, room temperature
2 tablespoons milk
1 cup (2 large) very rip bananas

Preheat oven to 350, whisk dry ingredients together. Cream butter and sugar, beat until fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time, then peanut butter, bananas, milk, and vanilla. Mix until fairly smooth, banana chunks are okay. Slowly add flour mixture, mix until just incorporated. Fill cups about 2/3, bake 16-18 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

I neglected to go shopping ahead of time for this project and my bananas were a far cry from ripe. So I thought I would cook the banana to bring out the flavor. Why did I think that? I don't know. It didn't work. It did, however, make the bananas and peanut butter very hot.

It sounded like Mac N Cheese.

It was pretty sweet, because halfway through making the batter my handmixer died. It died a loud and annoying death, leaving me in the lurch. Stupid thing. Let it be known that Black and Decker makes the world's worst handmixers. It only had 2 speeds: stupid fast and dangerous fast. Butter was everywhere. This may have been why my batter turned out so thick - kind of like oatmeal. But really thick oatmeal.

This is gonna be good. I hope.

They came out alright - more like muffins than cake, really. They domed really nicely in the oven, the were just very dense.

Muffins! Wait, that's not right. . .

Frosting time.

So I had to change my plan mid-project due to my SUPER CRAPPY handmixer's failure to not suck big time. After a bit of research, I settled on a marshmallow frosting, which didn't seem to require high speed mixing to reach a frosting-y consistency. Recipe:

2 cups mini-marshmallows
2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup butter

Stir together brown sugar and milk over low heat until dissolved. Cover and let cook 3 minutes, then uncover and turn to high heat until mixture reaches 238 degrees. Careful, that's effing hot. Remove from heat and add butter and marshmallows, stirring until smooth. Continue to stir away from heat until mixture cools down and thickens. It's a fine line between overly syrupy and impossible to spread, so exercise caution.

Cheese curds n gravy! Wait, that's not right. . .

Everything turned out mostly okay, I think. That frosting's pretty touchy when it cools, so I'd just say frost your cakes quickly. The cakes themselves were, as I said, dense, and the banana flavor wasn't so awesome. Still, everything together was pretty good. I'd give it a rating of 87% intense. Do they go there? Yeah, sure. Especially with dinosaur sprinkles. Sweet!

Prehistorically delicious!