Kitchen Disaster ... or not??

I'm a bit picky about my babies eating refined sugars. By their second birthday they are usually digging into a store bought or boxed cake, but for the first birthday I make them a healthy version of a cake to tear into. The problem is that I am rather incompetent in the kitchen. I'm famous for messing up Hamburger Helper... three times. So a from scratch cake is really pushing my limits. Christian and Jayna each got an Applesauce cake that was okay. They enjoyed them for the most part, but most of the leftovers got tossed. That recipe has long since been lost (perhaps thrown out with the Hamburger Helper Boxes) so for Hope I had to find a new one. So off to the trusty Google search I go and found this site: 

Healthy First Birthday Cake Recipes

  I scrolled through them and was captured by the following statement, "If you have little baking experience and you're worried about making a mess of baby's first birthday cake, then this is the recipe to try - it's almost foolproof!"

Recipe and Foolproof are usually not words I put in the same sentence so I figured I would prove the author wrong. The problem was I didn't! The Banana and Blueberry cake was delicious! We had muffins for breakfast the morning of Hope's birthday and they were a huge hit with the entire family. Well, not the icing. I was shocked. My entire family was eating the same thing that I had made from scratch. It was not only healthy, but the kids only wanted the "cake" and not the icing. 

After this great triumph I was determined to make these cupcakes part of our everyday diet. So one day this week I stocked up on ingredients and decided to tackle a double batch. My first task was to mash up 12 bananas. That didn't sound too fun so I decided to try out the strange machine that recently took up residence in the corner of our kitchen.

Lo and behold

So maybe this baking thing might just work out. 

I continued to prepare the dry ingredients and then the others that needed to be added (chopping blueberries which I found was easier to do if they were still a bit frozen, melting butter, and whipping eggs.) During the egg whipping stage I ran into a snap. I needed 8 eggs and only had 6. Looking out my window I did not see the cars of any neighbors home to borrow from (yes, we do that on our street) so back to Google I went. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that bananas can be used as an egg substitute. Since I already had 12 bananas in there I figured being short a couple of eggs wouldn't matter. This kind of thinking often gets me in trouble. Before I could finish the project it was time to get Whine 2 from school. So after lunch I was back to business but now with a helper. I mixed up the ingredients and filled the muffin tins.

But oops... there appears to be an ingredient that didn't make it into the mix. So I scraped everything from the tins and little cake pans back into the mixer, turned it on (too fast, got splattered, learned a lesson) and cleaned all the pans to begin again. Got it all ready and realized I had never turned on the oven. So wait to preheat, put them in, nurse the baby and...

Maybe a little burned as previously mentioned nursing baby stops at no timer, but overall not too bad. Final test of success:

YES!! Both Whine 1 and Whine 2 gave their approval and ate about 3 mini-muffin cakes each. If the lack of eggs, late added butter or slight browning was a problem, it was completely missed by these two.

The only challenge I'm facing now is that this process took me all day. That was three days ago and there are only about 4 muffin cakes left. Please tell me the process can be streamlined.

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