Ground beef with vegetable medley, banana cupcakes with chocolate peanut butter cream cheese frosting

After getting back from work around 10:20 Wednesday night, I set out to create my dad's corn & ground beef dish. However, seeing that this would be the sole dish of a dinner, I decided to add more vegetables to it. My ingredients:

• Ground beef (90% lean)
• Celery
• Carrots
• Onions 
• Cilantro
• Garlic
• Corn (fresh)
• Soy sauce
• Honey

Looking back, the fresh corn component was unnecessarily difficult, and it wouldn't have been much different than using frozen corn. I'll probably use frozen corn in the future. I also added too much cilantro, too little garlic, and not enough onions (I only used 1/2 an onion). But better to go conservative with the onions. :)
The honey was added only b/c the dish didn't achieve the sweetness that my family's dish has... I needed more corn, I suppose. Overall, dish was very simple, forgiving of my mistakes, and tasty in the end. Pretty healthy too! 90% lean is a good percentage for meat.

Then, tonight I set out to make banana cupcakes because we had 3 overly ripe bananas, and a cupcake tin. I used a chocolate peanut butter cream cheese frosting... which probably wasn't the best idea (I combined the choc pb frosting with a pb cream cheese frosting idea). Three extremely rich flavors makes one deadly frosting. I think it's overwhelming when combined with the banana cupcake.
Luckily, the cupcake recipe I used is a more conservative recipe; it only uses 1 stick of butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 bananas, salt, 2 eggs, cinnamon and vanilla extract. Looking back, I should have used 1 more egg, but that's life. hahaha :)

Then, I made vanilla cupcakes because I had way too much leftover frosting. My vanilla cupcakes imitated my banana cupcake recipe, without the bananas of course. I should have used at least 1 more egg (maybe 2), more vanilla, and some lemon in my cupcake. Now I'm more aware of cupcake ratios for next time! (Magnolia's vanilla cupcake recipe is gross; way too much sugar and butter, imo).

I love baking! Even when it means consuming hot cupcakes at 2am... mmMMmm.