I have been posting regularly again for over a year now, and more than I ever did when we started it. (It’s amazing how much time you can find in a day when you’re not doing high school homework or trapped in LA traffic!) But I’ve gotten pretty lazy about maintenance and admin things. Molly set everything up very professionally, and nothing has broken, so nothing has needed my meddling! I have my posting system and routine and it works for me. I know that I’m posting to my loyal ten person audience, and I know how to make sure it reaches them!
Or… so I thought? I recently logged in to the blog email and ventured over to Google Analytics and found that it, uh… turns out more than ten people have read this blog in the past year. It was actually more like, um, 63,000 people in 2024?!?
And apparently 38,722 of the those views were on this Almond Croissant Banana Bread. Who knew?!
My initial thought upon seeing these number was that this was somehow bot traffic. But, from what I was able to glean from Googling, bot traffic usually scrapes through the whole site, and doesn’t just focus on one page of a site. And the average amount of time spent on the page was pretty low, but… not like 3-seconds low? So it does appear to be at least somewhat real traffic. How this happened is very unclear. Of all the posts… why that one? It’s no different than the others.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information. I don’t really plan on doing anything differently, since I haven’t cracked the code on why the banana bread was so successful. It’s not like each post is getting thousands of readers, and it’s not like they’re all engaged and clamoring for content. And it’s not like this traffic has translated into thousands of ad revenue dollars. (It’s translated into… $14!) I’ve just been posting more than usual, and I guess it has had a wider reach without me knowing it? So I’ll just keep doing that.
All this to say: for the ten very dedicated fans I have, don’t worry. I’ll still keep using this as my baking diary where I complain about my job in the copy, interspersed with photos of cookies. I won’t go changin’.
But this all very conveniently coincided with me having some bananas on the counter that I’d been planning to bake with. I figure, what better way to toast to the success of the banana bread post than with more banana!
I made a half-cake version of these Banana Cupcakes with Oatmeal Cookie Frosting back in June for my niece’s half birthday party, but I didn’t photograph it because it got eaten so quickly. However, since I made up the frosting recipe, I’ve been wanting to document it somewhere, so I made cupcake versions.
So I guess these are celebration cupcakes for… achieving some mysterious and ambiguous level of success without knowing it! Celebration cupcakes for this site receiving about 62,500 more views than I thought it had!
And in the meantime (in the spirit of awards show season), I’d like to say: I do it all for the fans! And I would like to personally shout out the one person who viewed this blog from Kazakhstan. Shout out to my Kazakhstani fan!
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PinDescription
This recipe makes just 6 cupcakes, but can easily be doubled for a full dozen
Ingredients
For the Banana Cupcakes:
- 3 ounces unsalted butter, melted and browned to just over 1/4 cup of butter
- 1 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp granulated sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 large egg
- 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 2 tbsp buttermilk
- ½ cup + 2 tbsp mashed banana (from about 1.5 medium bananas)
For the Oatmeal Cookie Frosting:
- 1 stick butter
- 1/4 cup oats
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp butter extract
- 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
Instructions
- Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 375 degrees F. Line 6 muffins tins with parchment liners and set aside.
- Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Butter will begin to foam and crackle as it melts. When the crackling subsides, the butter will begin to brown. Swirl the pan as the butter cooks. When the butter browns and begins to smell nutty, remove the pan from the flame and transfer the butter to a small bowl. Taking the butter out of the hot saucepan will stop the butter from overcooking and burning. Set aside to cool.
- In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, vanilla extract, and buttermilk. Whisk in the mashed bananas. When butter has cooled, whisk in the browned butter.
- Add the wet ingredients, all at once to the dry ingredients. Fold together, making sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl to reveal any hidden pockets of flour. Fold together ingredients, but try not to over stir.
- Spoon batter into prepared pan. Bake for 23-28 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into one of the muffins comes out clean. Remove from the oven and allow to rest in the pan for 15 minutes, before inverting onto a wire rack to cool completely before frosting.
- While your cake is cooling, prepare the frosting. In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat your butter just to get it out of its stick shape. Add oats, cinnamon, butter extract, baking soda, and salt, and beat until combined. Slowly add powdered sugar, increasing the speed of the mixer until it is on high. Keep beating it on high until the frosting gets nice and fluffy. Pause and scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Sample the frosting – add more sugar or salt as needed to balance the flavors.
- Once your cupcakes are cool, frost as desired. Enjoy!
Notes
Cake from Joy the Baker