Peanut Butter Cup Cupcakes

Last month, I saw an idea for cupcakes that I thought John would like. They're fairly simple. Just mix up some yellow cake batter (I used Duncan Hines), pour it into cupcake paper, stick a Reese's peanut butter cup in the middle, and bake. When they're cooled, cover with peanut butter buttercream icing (see recipe below).

After I made the batter and poured it into the cupcake wrappers, I stuck a peanut butter cup on top of each cupcake.

And it surprised me that the cupcake baked up and around it. (I expected the peanut butter cup to rise with the cupcake.)

Come to find out, the peanut butter cup actually sunk to the bottom of cupcake, but it still tasted very good.

Here's the finished product.

We'll definitely make these again. We think they were even better the second day. Next time, I think I'm going to try some different things with the peanut butter cup to see if I can keep it from sinking to the bottom. When I made them this time, I put the smallest part of the peanut butter cup on bottom, so I think I'll try a few inverted next time. I also thought I would see how it would work if I don't push the peanut butter cup into the batter (I think it will just melt, though), and I'll also try some with two peanut butter cups inside.

Peanut Butter Buttercream Icing
I started out following a recipe for the icing, but that didn't last too long. I threw a stick of softened, unsalted butter into the mixing bowl and then added six tablespoons of milk, two tablespoons of vanilla, about a cup of peanut butter (roughly half of an 18-ounce jar), and a pinch of salt. That's when I discovered I didn't have the 5-6 cups of powdered sugar that I needed to double the recipe I was loosely following. I think I had about three cups that I just dumped in, but that seemed to work out just fine. The icing was just the right thickness, and it spread easily. Plus, it tasted really good.

One note is that it's best to refrigerate these cupcakes. The icing gets all mushy since it contains real butter, and the peanut butter cups get a little melty too.