Sprinkles Cupcakes

Sprinkles Cupcakes are my favourite things in the world! If you haven't had the luxury of trying a Sprinkles cupcake fresh from one of their stores (www.sprinklescupcakes.com/locations.html), their mixes are pretty much equally as delicious. My friend Courtney is usually the one to notify me when Williams Sonoma has a new flavour of Sprinkles Cupcake Mix. However, when she told me their newest flavour was banana, I was hesitant to believe her. Could they actually be making it possible for me to make my very favourite flavour in the comfort of my own kitchen?! Was this just an American Williams-Sonoma phenomenon? Or did she just mistake the yellow label for lemon... I dashed over to my nearest WS as quick as my legs would carry me and was overjoyed when I beheld the pale yellow "banana" label. So I brought them home, started collecting all the ingredients and was crushed to realize that the mix didn't call for a real banana. No fresh banana meant that the mix probably had artificial banana flavouring... I would just have to wait and see.

After 30 mins of baking time I tasted the final product... a normal cupcake eater probably wouldn't notice the difference, but a Sprinkles connoisseur like me was disappointed - I make a better banana cake than this mix :(
Instead of going with the vanilla or bittersweet chocolate icing as recommended by the mix, I paired them with cinnamon cream cheese icing and cinnamon chocolate cream cheese icing - delicious! Although they didn't live up to store-bought Sprinkles, they were still eaten up by the end of the weekend. But next time, i'll stick to the Red Velvet mix.