"Do not poke monkeys unless they are mocking you." Wise words offered by Teddy in August of 2006. It does not hurt to carry bananas as a peace offering. No one wants to be mocked by monkeys.

Perhaps banana cupcakes are the next best thing. No one will go apeshit today.

"You go whole hog when you like someone
I go apeshit when you forget me
Well, I forget what it's like to be kissing in the middle of a terrible dream
I forget what it's like to be kissing in the middle of a terrible storm…
–Kristin Hersh "Cathedral Heat" (link only works for Spotify users)

Ages ago, I offered up a recipe for banana bread, highlighting substitutions. Today I am reusing the same recipe, made into cupcakes, because I had a LOT of yogurt to use up. It makes no difference whether you use yogurt, sour cream or buttermilk in this recipe.

I made variations on the final result here and turned them into cupcakes. In some, I swirled in some Nutella before baking. In others, I have hollowed out part of the cupcake and filled it with coconut filling (recipe below, even though I am not totally happy with how it turned out – I just tried it because it was simpler than a more complex and time consuming coconut pastry cream recipe I had). Other cupcakes will remain plain and others will get caramel topping. The verdict on these experiments will come later.

Coconut filling
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup coconut milk (or regular milk if you prefer)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups of coconut
2 tablespoons butter

Bring sugar and milk to a boil over medium heat. Add the coconut and cook until mixture is thick. Then add the vanilla, salt and butter.

This can be used as a coconut filling for layer cakes (that seems to be the consistency achieved). It makes enough for two layers.

…When I decided to fill the cupcakes, I ended up cutting the middle out of the baked banana cupcakes, filling them with coconut (I added a little bit of extra coconut milk to the filling to make it a bit creamier) and then replaced the top of the cupcake. (I used the extra coconut filling to fill some chocolate cupcakes.)