Reeses Peanut Butter Cup-cake

Okay, first of all I think I need to take a course to figure out how to put the pictures on this thing the way I want! But anyway, it occurred to me that I have cupcake in my blog title and have never put a cupcake recipe on here. It also occurred to me that Trent had surgery over two weeks ago and I was only a good nurse/wife/compassionate type person for about one week. Then I got sick of the whole thing and kind of ignored him but I do love the guy and I want him to love me back so I thought I would try to come up with a cupcake that I thought he would love. He has always had a thing for peanut butter and chocolate and I have tried to make peanut butter cupcakes with chocolate frosting before but they turned out kind of dry and not stellar. So this time I decided to reverse the order and see how it turned out. So I made regular chocolate cupcakes and placed a mini Reese's cup in the center of each one. The above photo is the chocolate batter with the cupcake pressed into it. Then I made a frosting of cream cheese and peanut butter and decorated with Reese's Pieces (thank you for the idea Colby!)

These are the cupcakes before I frosted them. Most of them you couldn't even see where the Reese's cup was but in a couple it peeked out the top, so I just buried it in frosting.

Here is the finished cupcake, I thought they turned out really cute and the were really really good. Trent loved them, which is saying a lot because he doesn't hold anything back when he tells me what he thinks about my cooking (or anything else for that matter).

Here is one cut open so you can see the surprise Reese's cup center.

So here is the recipe:

Shalyn's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup-Cakes

Any chocolate cake recipe that you like will do. Here is my standard chocolate cake though:

1 box of chocolate cake mix (18.25 oz)----a box, gasp! I know.

1 box of instant chocolate pudding (3.4 oz)

small carton sour cream (8 oz)

4 eggs

1/2 C vegetable oil

1/2 C warm water

About 24 mini Reese's

combine all ingredients (except Reese's), then mix on high for two minutes. Fill baking tin with paper liners and fill cups about 1/2 full with batter. Place a mini Reese's in the center of each cup and gently press, (unwrap the candy obviously). Bake 350 F for about 20 minutes. Cool completely before frosting.

For the frosting, I kind of made it up as I went but this is the basic idea:

Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting

1 brick cream cheese, softened (8 oz)

1 stick butter, softened

1 C creamy peanut butter

splash of milk

2-4 C powdered sugar

splash vanilla

cream together the cream cheese, butter and peanut butter. start adding in a little powdered sugar at a time. Add in the splash of vanilla and milk and keep adding powdered sugar with the mixer going until it gets to a spreadable fluffy consistency. The End.