It's Not Banana Bread

"What distinguishes a muffin from a cupcake?" is what I was asked when I presented these banana cupcakes to my co-workers yesterday.
My answer? The density, moistness, the amount of sugar added, and of course, "a muffin doesn't have icing...duh!"

Well after that, I gained the assumption that since everyone is so accustomed to eating banana bread, regardless the treat, it made people believe they were eating a muffin as opposed to a cupcake. Oh well!

Anyways, back on track here.
These were about as easy as it gets. I snared the recipe from Martha Stewart, but tweaked the recipe slightly; the icing, quite a bit.
I doubled the recipe and used only 1/2 the amount of banana and only 1 cup of sugar as opposed to the 1-1/2 cups it called for. To balance out the moisture and acidity the bananas would have imparted I added about 2 tablespoons of buttermilk to the mix.

For the icing, I used the basic recipe on the site, but added another 1/4 cup of confectioners sugar and mixed in 1 tablespoon of honey, approximately 1/2 teaspoon of fresh grated ginger and about 1 tablespoon of lemon juice (if I had actual lemons on hand I would have used lemon zest instead). I used the cinnamon I would have mixed in the icing to instead dust the tops of the cupcakes after the icing was freshly piped.

Well they were just about as tasty as they look. I was able to get 18 regular-sized cupcakes and 24 miniature-sized cupcakes out of the doubled batch.