Peanut Butter Filled Cupcakes

I love getting cupcakes from those adorable cupcake bakeries that are all over--and now I know why they cost $3 each. It takes a lot of love to get cupcake to look that cute, but...if you are in charge of bringing the dessert to a birthday party, these babies will make you the most popular girl in the room.

So, I started out with the blog Your Cup of Cake. Everything on the site looks yummy, so how can you go wrong. I loved that the recipe starts with a cake mix. What I wished I'd found on the blog were just some of the basic recipes so that you could mix/match your own concoction. I knew that my version would need chocolate icing instead of vanilla.

So, to begin...chocolate cupcakes. First, mix up the peanut butter filling--I knew that the recipe was going to make more filling than I needed, so I should have just made 1/2, oh well, next time. I mixed up the doctored cake mix recipe, here, and got to filling the cupcake liners. I used my cookie scoop to get the very stiff batter into the bottom of each liner. I smoothed the batter down and then used a teaspoon to put a bit of the peanut butter filling on top. Then I scooped a bit more chocolate batter on top and smoothed again. Total, the liner was 3/4 full...maybe next time I'll fill just shy of 3/4.



The frosting is a take on the chocolate butter cream recipe on Your Cup of Cake. I used 1 c. butter, 2 oz. of cream cheese (left over from the peanut butter filling), 3 C. powdered sugar and 1 T of milk and 1 tsp of vanilla. I used about 2/3 C. of cocoa powder-but it tasted pretty good without the cocoa. I whipped it up for about 6 minutes in the Kitchen Aid so it would get nice and fluffy.

After the cupcakes were cooled, I used a Wilton Star #21 tip on some of them and the Wilton Round #12 tip on the others to get piles of fluffy frosting on each treat. I topped them with some Reece's cups. Yeah, these are good.