Penguins and Peanut Butter Cups

Hello everyone! How is everyone handling the time change? I don't know how the penguins do it, dealing with complete darkness 6 months out of the year. Did you know that at Sea World, they turn the lights off in the penguin encounter for 6 months since that's what the penguins are used to? A little nugget of trivia that I learned from my Astronomy professor.

I made my way over to my friend Jen's house the other day. I don't like showing up empty handed so I quickly hit the pantry to see what ingredients I had to work with. I quickly noticed that I had bags of chocolate chips that had yet to be used. Those little guys were meant to be used in something other than cookies and I was going to help them reach their fullest potential! For Halloween I bought a bag of Reese's candies and it contained white chocolate peanut butter cups. Since I gave all of my candy away before trying one, I decided now was a great time to make some from scratch!

Since I've never dabbled in the world of peanut butter cups before, I turned to the internet for ideas. The best recipe I came across was on Brown Eyed Baker, but I decided to make some changes to it to really make it perfect!

Peanut Butter Cups

Yield
About 42 cups

Ingredients

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp light brown sugar
8 tbsp powdered sugar 

(3) 11 oz bags of good quality chocolate chips (milk, white or dark)

3 tbsp of vegetable oil

Directions

Line a mini-muffin pan with paper liners; set aside. Line a baking sheet with wax or parchment paper; set aside.

For the Peanut Butter Mixture

In a medium saucepan, combine the peanut butter, butter and brown sugar over medium heat. Heat until completely melted, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat. Add the powdered sugar, in two parts, stirring until completely combined with the peanut butter mixture after each addition. Set aside.

For the Chocolate Mixture

Using the double boiler method, fill a heatproof bowl with the chocolate chips and set over a pot of simmering water, stirring constantly with a heatproof spatula. You don't have to melt all the chocolate chips at once; can be done in sections. The chocolate must be extremely smooth and somewhat runny.*

*A good way to test this is by scooping up some chocolate with the spatula and allowing it to stream into the bowl. If the chocolate is too thick, it will stick to your spatula and will not stream in a fluid motion. If this is the case, add in the 2 tbsp of vegetable oil and incorporate completely. If it is still too thick, which I noticed was the case with the white chocolate, add in more vegetable oil, a tsp at a time, until you have reached the desired consistency. With the milk chocolate chips, I didn't have to use any oil.

Scoop a spoonful of chocolate into the bottom of each muffin cup (about 1/3 full) and give the pan a few firm taps on the counter to even out the chocolate.

Using a tsp, scoop out the peanut butter mixture. Roll it into a ball and flatten it into a disk (I used a bottle cap to flatten them out evenly). Place disks on the prepared baking sheet lined with paper. Once finished with all of the peanut butter mixture, refrigerate the muffin pans and the peanut butter disks for about 15 minutes.

Once chocolate is firm, place a peanut butter disk on top of each chocolate-lined muffin pan. Use a spoon to add melted chocolate* on top and around each peanut butter disk until completely covered. Tap the pan again so that the chocolate fills all the empty spaces and remains even on the surface. If necessary, add a little more chocolate and tap again. If you see any air bubbles on the surface, poke them gently with a toothpick and tap the muffin pan again.

*If the chocolate is firming up, return bowl to the pot of simmering water for about a minute until chocolate is completely melted and smooth.

Refrigerate finished peanut butter cups again for about 20 minutes, until completely firm. Remove the peanut butter cups from the pan and store in an air-tight container or in the refrigerator. You can even freeze them!

You'll go nuts for these cups!