Whenever I'm feeling down, I like to bake. Well, I don't actually like to bake, since when I'm feeling down I don't really like anything, but when I find myself being followed all over the house by a drizzly cloud of gloom, a little voice inside me says quite firmly, "I think you'd better bake now." And I'm always glad when I do.

This weekend the blues struck hard for some reason, but I managed to banish them with these banana cupcakes. The recipe, from one of my favorite food blogs, Orangette, is actually for a cake, but since I had promised a friend some baked goods as a thank-you for lending me an ice-blue ladies' bicycle for Rob to use during his visit, I decided to make cupcakes. I wanted to eat some of them, you see. And no one likes to get half a cake as a thank-you.

I was excited about this recipe because it is a rare thing when a food blog in another country actually posts something I can make. Pungent cheeses, bundles of fresh fennel, baskets of ripe cherries -- this is the stuff of dreams in Japan. Bananas, however, are cheap and plentiful here. Bananas I could do.

And so I left my drizzly cloud of gloom in the living room while I pureed and sifted and mixed in the kitchen. There is something calming about the weighing, the measuring, the following directions, kind of the way it felt to do a particularly satisfying math worksheet in elementary school. I decided to go my own way with the frosting, since the small packets of sad, shriveled coconut I had seen on the shelves couldn't compare to my best friend in baking: kinako. I thought the nutty flavor would work especially well with the banana, since I am a wholehearted supporter of the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. It turned out even better than expected -- I posted the recipe here.

The batter made exactly a baker's dozen, so I ate the thirteenth cupcake, cooled and frosted, standing over the sink. Man, it was good. And you're probably not surprised to hear that by the time I sat back down on the couch, my drizzly cloud of gloom had completely vanished.