Banana and Coconut Cupcakes (butter and sugar free)

Now, these are not cupcakes in the traditional sense.

Hm, sounds promising, eh?

When someone mentions 'cupcake' to you, I bet you imagine a sweet and fluffy little cake, topped with icing, frosting or buttercream, whilst looking oh-so-pretty at the same time.

Well these ones are not too bad-looking (I suppose). But as you've probably worked out from the blog title, these 'cupcakes' are butter and sugar free. Which makes for a slightly different texture to what you might be expecting.

I don't even know what I was expecting to be honest, but as I put this together, I was resigned to the fact that they wouldn't work. The mixture was quite tough, and the ratio of wet-to-dry didn't look quite right. There didn't seem to be enough liquid, but I decided to just go with it and bake them anyway.

Yes, when you need two utensils to scrape a thick mixture off one spoon from another into a cupcake hole, it aint looking good. But I'm really glad that I decided to ignore the demons inside my head screaming at me to stop and just give up.

Cos look!

They did not turn out tough and tasteless - they actually have more of a 'bready' texture and pretty moist.

And well as the banana and coconut, these have orange juice concentrate and vanilla essence too, to add to the sweetness. So, don't be put off by the tough mixture if you try this out - it's er, 'meant' to be like that - as you will still end up with delightfully sweet cupcakes!

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C. In a small bowl, mash the banana with the beaten egg, orange juice, oil and vanilla.

2. In a large mixing bowl, sift in the flour with the 50g coconut and baking powder.

3. Fold in the banana mixture, then spoon evenly into 10 lined cupcake holes. Top with a little extra coconut, then bake for about 20 minutes until just risen.

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