Sweet Success

After the EPIC fail and the loss of our precious starter, Sadie, we were pretty blue. We’ve been baking bread for ages, and nothing prepared us for that whole… disgusting, gummy, horribly-sweet smelling… goo that was the inside of what should have been a toothsome, wholesome loaf of bread. *Shudder*

After we buried Sadie in the trash, we were in search of something quick and simple and — satisfying to make for D’s oral PhD presentation on Tuesday. Because his presentation takes place in an open forum — where any and everyone is basically there to critique one’s arguments, we figured we could glue a few critical mouths closed with some judiciously applied peanut butter. Celine’s recipe provided a tasty looking and clearly written jumping off point for us, and we only adjusted our recipe slightly from there.

Peanut Butter Cups

• 20 cupcake liners – should be mini, but use what you have. Ours were larger
• 3/4 cup dark chocolate chunks, or 10 ounces of 70% dark chocolate, broken
• 2/3 cup natural creamy peanut butter + 2 T to add to the melted chocolate
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar + 2 T in which to roll log
• 2 T pure vanilla extract
• 1 T ground ginger, optional
• optional pinch fine salt – we didn’t add extra, but you may prefer to

First, set out your cupcake liners on a cookie sheet. You’ll want to move them as a unit when they are filled, and you’ll regret your messy hands later if you don’t do this step now.

Then, melt your chocolate. We first set our chocolate chips in a bowl and …left them on the radiator for an hour or so. This melted them very slowly and thoroughly. If you have a house without this nifty radiator option, break your bar into small chunks and microwave on high. We checked our chocolate every thirty seconds, and it took a minute and a half in our microwave to achieve meltage. When the first chunks melted, we simply added our two tablespoons of peanut butter and stirred until the rest of the chocolate succumbed. Melting the remaining chocolate this way prevents burning and allows the chocolate to keep its tempering.

Next, we spooned one teaspoon of melted chocolate into the bottom of each cupcake liner.

Then, in a separate bowl, we combined the rest of the peanut butter, the powdered sugar, and the vanilla. The peanut butter stiffened up fairly rapidly, so we turned it out on a plastic cutting board to knead it for a minute or two, to be sure that the sugar was well incorporated. We rolled it into a log and cut twenty one inch slices from the roll. Natural peanut butter won’t let you fiddle with it for too long without getting even less malleable, so be fairly quick about this step!

Next, we took each of the little slices and flattened them and set them right in the middle of the first chocolate layer. If you use mini-cupcake liners, this is probably a lot harder, and using Celine’s method of coating the liner might be easier. We did it this way so that we could easily and quickly fill all twenty cups, and be ready for the final step.

In between working with the chocolate, we replaced it on the radiator. If you need to, you can zap yours for another ten to fifteen seconds in the microwave.

Finally, we added one generous tablespoon of powdered ginger to the last of our chocolate, stirred it thoroughly, and then ladled one generous tablespoon of chocolate atop each of the peanut butter slices.

And that’s really it. Chill your beauties in the fridge for forty minutes to an hour. They set beautifully — have that distinctive peanut butter cup fluting on the edges when the paper is pulled away — and melt on your hands almost instantaneously, so by all means, pop that sucker in your mouth!

After the bread disaster, our small daily eating successes — a gorgeous crock of zesty mustard, a rustic “beef,” penne pasta and black kale stew, and now this quick and fun treat — sort of salve the loss of losing our starter, and having to deal with an oven which requires the bread to be turned repeatedly so that it will cook evenly (!#$%Z^%&*@!). Eventually, we’ll live in a house with a model kitchen — but that’ll probably be in a house we own and that’s three long years and a graduation from now. Still! Success is success, and you can’t argue with salty-sweet, addictive, peanut butter cups! These things are truly amazing.

Look forward to more baking and experimenting through the holidays as soon as we get home and in a decent kitchen…!

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