Vegan Banana Buttercream Frosting

It's been a year since we celebrated my roommates birth with an epic white chocolate banana birthday cake. This year she once again asked for something baked with banana and for the first time I actually had no over-ripe bananas!

Improvising, I tried to incorporate (vegan) banana buttercream filling into (vegan) chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting on top. Adding real banana, or any fruit to buttercream frosting causes it to separate and loose its texture, but it still worked for the filling and no one else seemed to notice ;)

For fun I added a (vegan) hand-rolled Belgium chocolate truffle on top of the peanut butter frosting.

My favorite flavor combination was actually the one cupcake that was dipped in chocolate ganache because I ran out of peanut butter frosting. It reminded me of a Hostess Cupcake but with a fresh, natural, banana, (and better) filling. It looked just like one and had the same texture without the weird sugar film you get in your mouth after eating Hostess products.

These cakes looked totally awesome, but I didn't take pictures except for this crappy one I took with my 3g phone. With this cupcake, I threw everything on it: banana buttercream filling, peanut butter frosting, a tiny chocolate truffle, then all dipped in chocolate ganache... tasty but messy looking.

Gina's (http://ginaespo.blogspot.com/) photo!

I realized I should have taken a picture of the Hostess look-a-like once I had eaten ½ of it, but I really didn’t want to stop to grab the camera. 

I plan to experiment with the banana frosting a couple more times- First with folding finely mashed banana in at the end and then possibly try heating up mashed banana, letting it cool and then folding it in at the end. Once I do all this, I'll update the blog.