Holy Split! - Part II It all comes together!

Now that I have banana & strawberry cupcakes (see previous post), I moved on to the rest of the flavors. Like I said before, I definitely wanted chocolate, but I didn't want this to turn into a chocolate cupcake with banana flavor. So I decided to make a ganache to go in between the frosting and the cupcake.

I doubt I need to actually say this, but I am NOT the kind of person who knows about something as fancy as "ganache". But I know people who are and they told me about it. Basically, it sounds like a big deal, but it's just solid chocolate (like chips) added to milk or cream and heated to mix together. Not too big of a deal really. I had a recipe in the book I was already using so I thought I'd try it. It's probably something that should have been easier, but I thought it was too runny so I added more chips (when in doubt - add chocolate!) and made it really thick. Basically it's like a semisolid chocolate when I was done. For safety, I taste tested it. It definitely passed!

So, I put a little dollop on each cupcake right in the center like this.

I then flattened it out to kind of hide it inside the frosting.

For the remaining flavors - pineapple, whipped cream, nuts & cherry - I decided to make a pineapple buttercream topped with nuts & a cherry. I figured buttercream is close to whipped cream, right? I found a pretty simple recipe here which I of course tweaked a bit. I'm not sure if I added too much pineapple or if it was just too warm in my house but the frosting settled a bit after I piped it out. The final product definitely had the look of a sundae with the cherry & nuts on top!

Here is a picture of the inside so you can see all the different elements. Like I said, it's a little warm right now (why is it in the 70's in October?!) so they aren't as pretty as I'd like, but still cute and definitely tasty! My coworkers were kind enough to taste them and give me feedback. They were all impressed with it and said it did taste exactly like a banana split!