Stupid baking tricks: Peanut butter cup-cakes
4 Aug
Last weekend, before I got sick, I got it into my fool brain to concoct a chocolate peanut butter themed cupcake. From scratch. What can I say? I’ve been reading too much Bakerella & Building a Bakery.
My first step was to find a chocolate cupcake recipe. Bakerella pointed me toward Martha Stewart. All culinary road end at Martha Stewart.) I wanted peanut butter frosting, so I Googled that and found the first one on Allrecipes.com that had a good rating. I followed the recipe and put one miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup into each filled cup before I put the tray into the oven. I made sure the cup was completely covered by the batter.
The cupcakes were fully baked in 20 minutes; however, the cup sank to the very bottom of the cupcake during baking. Next up was the frosting. I mixed it according to the recipe, and it’s really, REALLY peanut buttery. I piped the frosting onto half of the batch and decorated each with a half of a cup, jauntily placed on top. Cute, hm?
Looking at that dollop of PB frosting made me a bit ill, so I thinned the frosting a bit more (with milk) and gave the rest of the batch a thin coat of it. Then I dipped them in sprinkles.
They look great but taste merely okay to me. I like my chocolate cupcakes sweeter than this. It seems that if I start with unsweetened powder, I never can get the cake sweet enough to make me smile. But WM, the people at work, and the Comcast service guy liked them, so I guess it’s just me.
After I was done baking and cleaning my kitchen STUNK like peanut butter.
If I try this again, I may start with semi-sweetened cocoa (is there such a thing? there is!) and sit the PB cup on top so that it doesn’t sink all the way down.
By the way, an unexpected benefit of baking from scratch is that I don’t desire the end result at all. I usually just want to sit down. 
*Homer drool*
I am willing to be a taste tester!
Also, your CommentLuv code is showing up kinda wonky at the bottom of the left sidebar.
(I only noticed cuz it was bleeding over into the comment form)
And ComLuv doesn’t appear to be working quite right. :-\
I think I got cavity just by reading this post
Blah! I’ll have to tweak CommentLuv when I get home. Thanks for the heads-up!
Freaking awesome.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…sound yummy, but I think my dog would steal it if I had one here, he’ll steal anything with peanut butter in it. I think my wife has made something similar, will have to ask her when she gets up.
The whole baking something like this makes ya want to sit down, that don’t work for me. I love to sample the fruits of my labors.
they look DE LISH. the older i get, the less patience i have in the kitchen to bake/make things from total scratch. i’m an embelisher. i’ll buy a box mix then frufru it up. and now i want a cupcake. thanks. thanks a lot.