Less is more.

Cupcakes needn’t be all about cream and gooey icing to be a success. There is something inexplicably delicious about biting into soft sponge to find zingy fruity flavours like peaches and raspberries, or the smoothness of caramalised banana surrounding your taste buds. And of course there is always the slightly less sinful feeling when indulging, as the cupcake contains fruit and therefore must be good for you.

The problem I find though is when adding the fruit of the moment into your lovingly prepared cupcake mixture, there never looks to be enough fruit in the recipe. So you add a few more strawberries, or a few more slices of banana thinking that when you bite into the warm treat, the more fruit, the better.

Stop.

More fruit isn’t better in cookery, a lesson I found out when I over-enthusiastically added double the quantity of banana to my first batch of banana cupcakes, thinking that ten slices was just not going to cut it. In fact, less really in more in this instance as with fruit, there comes liquid, and as all good bakers will know, even if you are not going to follow a recipe, you should obey the basic ingredient ratio of dry:wet.

So as my much anticipated super duper bananary cupcakes emerged from the oven, I met them with distress to find that their middles had all sunk.

In this instance, it wasn’t so much of a failure as you might think; I loaded the middles up with toffee cream and topped them with a smidge of vanilla icing and produced a delicious batch of ooey gooey bananaramas, but for future fruit cupcakes I’ll try to hold back.