First order of business was chopping all the chocolate and cutting the butter into small pieces to start those ingredients melting over a simmering pot of water. While the chocolate and butter was melting I whisked together the dry ingredients and also made the peanut butter filling. I liked that this recipe didn't require the use of a hand mixer to put everything together. I also enjoyed that I could use paper liners (I took them off for the picture) instead of having to butter and flour the pans. It was a nice break since I had to butter and flour the cupcake pans for the two previous recipes.
Putting these cupcakes together was done similarly to these strawberry-jam tea cakes only the amount of batter and filling was different. I layered, in this order, 2 tablespoons of chocolate batter, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter filling, 1 tablespoon of batter and 1 teaspoon of filling, swirling the teaspoon of filling with a toothpick to get a swirl pattern on top. While these cupcakes also turned out to be larger than they were probably supposed to be I was much closer in getting the number of cupcakes the recipe said I would yield. The recipe said I would get 12 and I got 11. I was pretty happy with that. But knowing how the tea cakes had turned out I tried to use smaller tablespoons to make sure the batter would last, and to ensure the cupcakes wouldn't be enormous.
The cupcakes were baked for 40 total minutes with a turn halfway through the baking time. If memory serves me correctly I ended up adding about 2 extra minutes to the baking time because I didn't think they were quite done when I tested them with a toothpick. Since they were a little larger than they probably should have been, a little extra time made sense. Eventually I will get this tablespoon layering thing down. There are still quite a few cupcakes left in this section to give me some more practice.
I did also appreciate that these cupcakes didn't require any glazing, layering or frosting after they were done baking. A little reprieve from all the work I have done on the two previous cupcakes in this section. I took these cupcakes into work and everyone enjoyed them. I also sampled one myself and thought they were quite tasty and would go great with a glass of milk, or some vanilla ice cream. The only thing I was a little disappointed with was that I wanted the peanut butter filling in the middle to be a little farther down in the cupcake so when you cut the cupcake in half it would look like the filling was floating in the middle. But, it also could have just been the cupcake I had, I'm not sure what everyone else's looked like in the middle.
In other baking news, non-cupcake related, I'm going to try to post a Valentine's Day treat later this week. Maybe even in time for the actual holiday and before I'm invaded by my husband's family (who I love... seriously!) this coming weekend. Oh, and if you're wondering, yes, it did snow (a lot) in Connecticut this weekend. Turns out we didn't have to find Nemo, Nemo found us. Here are just a few pictures I took yesterday after shoveling off our deck so we could get out of the house.
