Peanut Butter Day!

Today is our first fun holiday of the year - Peanut Butter Day! And of course the best way to celebrate that sort of day is in the kitchen! Happily, a friend of mine just got his yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do, so I'm making cupcakes and we'll give some of them to him, so as not to mess up my weight loss efforts too much.

I googled peanut butter cupcakes to see what I could come up with, and found this recipe. Sounds tasty, but it's missing a couple of things. For instance, the directions say to add sugar to the filling, but there's no sugar listed in the filling's ingredients. Also, there's no baking instructions. But I tried it anyway. Balling up the filling and baking it right into the cupcake sounds very interesting! Here's what I did:

Filling:
1 T butter
1 T milk (I don't have the heavy cream it called for)
1 oz milk chocolate, grated (used my cheese grater & my food scale)
1/4 c creamy peanut butter
abt 1/2 c powdered sugar.

Have the chocolate grated before you start. Melt the butter & bring milk & butter to a boil. Add chocolate. Stir till smooth. Add peanut butter. Stir till smooth. Add powdered sugar a little at a time till the stuff starts pulling away from the sides of the pan when stirred with a whisk. Very scientific, I know. But that's how I did it. At one point I had a little too much powdered sugar, so I added a little slosh of milk. But make sure that if you do that it's a little slosh or you'll get all runny. Chill for about 40 minutes. Or long enough to post about it and move the wash and maybe sweep the kitchen (if the Boy sleeps that long).

6 (1 oz.) squares semi-sweet chocolate
6 tbsp. butter
2 lg. eggs
2/3 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 c. unsifted flour
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

Melt the chocolate and butter together. If you have a double boiler, that's what the original recipe says to use. But I don't have that particular toy, so I just grated and chopped the chocolate and then melted them over low heat in a glass pan until they were smooth. In another bowl beat eggs until foamy. Add sugar and vanilla and mix till cream well. Stir in chocolate mixture. Cream some more. Add dry ingredients and stir until incorporated.

Now is the part where things get really interesting because the original recipe ends here. So I guessed, and, as it turned out, I didn't guess very well. I put the chocolate batter into 12 cups and rolled the peanut butter stuff up into balls and set it into the cupcakes.



It was looking very tasty, and I was anticipating something like brownies, since the batter was so wet. But I baked it for about 17 min at 350 - until a toothpick came out clean - and then pulled them out of the oven. Bad things started happening. The cupcakes split and fell. And they were clearly still all sorts of raw in the middle, so I put them back into the oven for another few minutes. The tops were over cooked, and the bottoms very chewy. I think that if I try this recipe again I'll try cooking it for a long time on 300 or something low like that. Anyway, that's my best guess as to what went so horribly wrong with the poor cupcakes! I'd love to hear any suggestions for what might help these: the flavor in the chewy part was very good, and the peanut butter stuff has real promise, if I could just get the cupcakes to cook up a bit nicer.




For the rest of Peanut Butter Day we had peanut butter on a spoon for a snack and sang a Rafi song about peanut butter.

"Peanut butter sandwich made with jam!
One for me and one for David Amram,
A peanut butter sandwich made with jam!
Yum yum yummy yum yum!

"I can think of witches good and bad.
But the best witch that I ever had
Was a peanut butter sandwich made with jam!
Stick stick sticky stick stick!
Yum yum yummy yum yum!"