This [cake] is bananas, B!A!N!A!N!A!S!

Apologies to Ms Stefani, but look at this, would you?

Pretty foxy huh?  You'd never guess they were *gasp* banana flavoured.  I don't know if you can see from there, but I even did teensy little stamen things on the flowers (spent a looong time picking out yellows out of the hundreds and thousands mixture... boy, do I suffer for my art).  Not that I brag or anything, you understand... I'm just particularily proud of the fact that I managed to hold my gorge for an hour and a half while I was baking these.

Sur Une Nappe De Restaurant

Hooray!  My Jacques Dutronc CD arrived today, so I've been immersing myself in loveliness.  Speaking of loveliness...

Look at that beastie!  Even with the crapshack photoshop job that I've done on the background, doesn't it still look almost unholy in it's awesomeness!?  And your saliva glands are sending mad signals right now to your brain; 'Cake! Cake! Cake!' they say... and who would you be to deny them?

My Mother Baked a Little Cake for You

Finally!  There was an alignment of cosmic proportions (i.e, my birthday a few weeks ago now, but I've only just gotten over the shock of turning 28, which is why I'm writing about it now), and I made those 'White Stripes' themed cupcakes which I'd been ranting about for some time.  Here they are in all their glory...

Pretty sensational, am I right?  Okay, I confess: they have had a little photoshop touch up on the icing.  But that's only because I couldn't make the red frosting go red enough without using like, half a bottle of food colouring.  And since I was feeding these to a pregnant lady, I didn't really want to do that.  Oh, by the way, the pregnant lady is not me.  Just in case you were Getting Ideas.

Confessions aside, these were outrageously tasty, and I fully recommend that y'all check out that white cake recipe that I've got listed somewhere on here (it's from Epicurious.com, boy oh boy if you haven't checked out that website, I fully recommend that you do, but not before lunch because it will make you very disappointed with your cheese toasty.  Or whatever you people eat for lunch... I've been having a toastie phase).  All I did was half the recipe ('cause these cupcake papers are kind of tiny), and swap out half the flour for the blackest, richest cocoa I could find.  Yum!  And the frosting is peppermint flavour, which didn't go down too well with my lad, but I bloody loved it.  Total sucker for that flavour combo, so I am.