Whipped out the Wilton No. 103 petal tip for these when two friends J and XL came over to bake on a Sunday afternoon! And believe it or not, it’s a one-bowl recipe, and only one tip was used for this really simple decoration, which I’ll write about later 🙂

The banana chocolate cupcake / muffins were adapted from Marsha’s Baking Addiction. I chose it as it seems to have a good balance of what I like in a banana cupcake – something that is moist, flavorful yet light, when paired with buttercream roses. It has a pretty high content of banana (and I had 2 large ripe ones we needed to use up), and is also leavened by sour cream / green yogurt that usually provides a nice dimension to otherwise “simple sugars” from the banana and chocolate.

Main Modifications: reduced sugar from 150g to 100g, and replaced the 240ml Greek-style yogurt to 100ml of sour cream and topped up the rest with 140ml milk to make up 1 cup (240ml). No particular reason, except that those were the ingredients I had on hand. Usually with baking it’s advised  not to play around with the ingredients too much, but I was quite sure this would be ok, because both sour cream and greek yogurt are both acidic ingredients that will react nicely to the baking soda. This chemical reaction will create gas bubbles that will make your cakes rise to be light and fluffy. Greek yogurt/sour cream always makes bakes good more moist, and provides a tartness to balance out the sweetness.  The milk is a bit of a gamble – but I treated it as “home made buttermilk” haha (which is made by mixing 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar to every cup of whole milk and left to sit for 5 minutes until it turns sour). In terms of texture, the acidity in sour cream tenderizes the gluten in the flour to provide the moist and almost springy texture with a fine crumb, which consistently keeps very well and doesn’t dry out.

The product is a super moist and light chocolate banana cupcake, that’s moist, springy, and not overly oily that we sometimes get from banana bread bought from bakeries. (I like that this recipe gets most of its richness from the banana and sour cream than oil or butter – only 60ml in this recipe! Not a fan of banana breads that makes my fingers oily afterwards). And would definitely recommend the chocolate chips for additional indulgence! The actual cake is not heavy so it allows for that additional gooey chocolate chips melted within.

For the decorations, the only thing you need is one floral tip (Wilton No. 103 or 104)! One floral tip + no fear of failure haha. If you fail just scrape away. After that, just play around with the direction, pressure and the angle you pipe on the flowers. A tip for making neat gradient florals is something I learnt off a combination of videos Youtube, such as here, and here. When you wrap up each color in saran wrap, it allows for easy switching of colors and prevents color from mixing in your piping bag. In the first video, they used 2 piping bags within one big piping bag, which you can do as well. I find it easier if you put in 3 tubes of saran wrapped buttercream into one big piping bag!

This technique is nice for the Singapore weather as well. Because you can easily take out each color from the piping bag neatly, it stops you from wasting colored buttercream that accidentally mixed together, and you can always return each individual colored tube to the fridge the moment you feel that it starting to melt. My friend picked these 3 colors almost randomly but we ended up loving the effect and thought it reminded of our senior trip in Japan – perhaps it’s a combo of Hokkaido Melon desserts, purple Lavender ice cream from Farm Tomita in Furano, and the greenery we saw such as at Lake Bieie. Much nostalgia and if you know me you know I’m a sucker for that.. so here are more pictures from the trip we dug out :’)

“Spring in Hokkaido” Chocolate Banana Cupcakes