Reese's Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

Not long ago, I was baking with my friend Annie of Simple Gifts. We were in the mood to experiment and we wanted something we could decorate. We finally decided to make cupcakes. We set our friend Lauren on the task of finding a straight-forward cucpcake recipe that we could stick Reese's miniatures in and when I vetoed chocolate cupcakes, Lauren decided on a simple vanilla cupcake--an Amy Sedaris recipe.

Amy Sedaris is the author of Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People -- this is a super-fun (and somewhat snarky/humorous) book and I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, among others. The cupcake recipe we used comes from I Like You and your can find the recipe here.

Beating up the Cake Batter--it always feels so good!

Nestle in a Reese's Cup (Mini)

Cover wiht more batter until cups are 2/3 full

We placed a miniature Reese's cup in each of the cupcake tins after we'd filled it halfway with batter, and then covered the Reese's cup with batter, until each cup was about 2/3 full. We used a combination of mini-cupcakes and regular-sized cupcakes and with the mini-cakes we cut the miniature Reese's cups in half.

Once the cupcakes baked and cooled, we topped them with the peanut butter frosting found modified from the recipe found here. Our changes appear below.

Peanut Butter Frosting

1 cup powdered sugar

1 cup creamy peanut butter (we used reduced fat, because that's what we had on hand)

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1/3 cup skim milk

We piped the frosting onto the cupcakes and then sprinkled the top with chopped dark chocolate--and we couldn't resist adding M&Ms to a few of them.