Cupcakes and a blog in one day?

Turns out, its not possible. Not with a raging migraine anyway...

So instead of cupcakes and a blog I had cupcakes and a bitch of a throbbing headache yesterday. But getting back to those cupcakes....

I made Peanut Butter Cup cupcakes.

I got a chocolate cupcake recipe from allrecipes.com and made a few tweaks so that they would bake evenly with the pb cup stuck inside. I also wanted the pb cup to maintain its integrity during the baking process so I refrigerated them until just before covering them with batter.

For whatever reason the butter (which was way room temp) refused to cream no matter how much I beat it with my mixer (or my bare hands) it just pilled up. grrr So I had bits of it in the batter and it came out and leaked all over. When I pulled out the cupcakes they were literally dripping with butter and there was a pool of butter in each of the muffin cups.

The cupcakes had good texture and flavor and despite the butter making a run for the border, they were plenty moist. They didn't rise a whole lot and they were pretty dense but I think the damp winter season was too much for my can of baking powder so I will be picking up a new one of those before I make anything else.


They look good enough to eat, huh? And don't forget the surprise inside =D















You just can't have a naked cupcake! What would the neighbors say??
Back to allrecipes.com for a peanut butter frosting that would compliment the pb cup. Having been burned by no-cook powdered sugar frostings before I was cautious but I also had two boxes of C&H icing sugar I wanted to use up so I went for it. Instead of 2 full cups of powdered sugar I used 1 and 1/4 cups so the peanut butter taste would be the first and last thing you could taste, not the powdered sugar.

A few people bitched that this version of PB frosting was too stiff to spread but I had zero issues with it and it was, indeed, fluffy stuff.
I was excited to load up my pastry bag with a plain tip and pipe it on! Sadly the end result wasn't quite what I had hoped.














Wow, chocolate cupcakes with turd frosting? Tee, you shouldn't have.

Blah, lets try something else...





Thank goodness for offset spatulas! No more poo-cakes!

I finished them off with some chopped peanut butter cups. I like to garnish to give people a hint of whats inside.



For plating I piped some of the extra frosting onto a few PB cups with a star tip, cause I'm fancy like that.


They tasted pretty good but I am too hard on my baking to be anykind of a judge.
The almond extract in the cake recipe was a bit overwhelming and it clashed with a peanut butter. If I make these again I will omit the almond extract and just add more vanilla.
This recipe would be perfect for making a chocolate cake with a cherry filling and chocolate ganache topping as that would compliment the fruit perfectly.

But I would make these again, with more tweaking, of course. I just can't help myself!