If We Only Have Cupcakes

 Our choir celebrated Spring in our recent concert, so I made some treats to serve after the show. I felt like being "crafty" and I wanted to feature all the lovely pansies growing in the back yard.  We had some bananas that were going soft, so I made chocolate banana cupcakes.

 For the icing, I used a combination of coconut oil and (dairy) butter. I have been reading that coconut oil is good for those who tend towards diabetes. The jury is still out on that matter, but I am intrigued at how coconut oil behaves at different temperatures. And yes, it does have the unctuous quality of good old-fashioned butter. I added lots of cocoa powder to the icing and just a bit of icing sugar. I put the icing in the fridge overnight and brought it up to room temperature to ice the cupcakes.

 The texture seemed to hold up, but the coconut tends to "weep" a bit into the paper. I wrote some of the lyrics from our songs onto flags along with "I love you" in several languages. I searched the kitchen for toothpicks to use for flag poles, but they were AWOL, so I went to my neighbor's house to see if she had some. She didn't have toothpicks, but was just about to compost some black bamboo twigs. "Why don't you use these?" Well, lots of toothpicks are made of bamboo anyway, so I cut them down and they worked perfectly! I present to you spring cupcakes with homemade toothpicks!