Two Simple Cupcakes

Peanut Butter Filled Chocolate Cupcakes:


I think that at the beginning of this cupcake madness I said that the chocolate chip cupcakes were the first that I made from MSC. I lied. Well, it certainly wasn't intentional; you see, I just forgot about the Peanut Butter Filled Chocolate Cupcakes. They're delicious, but in my mind they're really more of a brownie than a cupcake. I'm not even going to enter the "what is a cupcake, really?" discussion here. It's circular, don't you think? Martha put these in the cupcake book, and for the purposes of this post they're a cupcake . . . with strong brownie tendencies. I wanted to make these right away because they looked super simple, and because they don't require any frosting. I'm a cake girl, I only like frosting when I'm in the mood for frosting.


Forget about the brownie though, the real selling point of these cupcakes happens to be the peanut butter filling. Good heavens, it tastes just like the inside of a Reese's peanut butter cup. Do you remember the commercials that depicted how people liked to eat their Reese's? I only like the center of a Reese's cup. Something about that chocolate is just a little too faux and waxy for my taste. This is why Reese's Eeaster eggs are far superior to the rest of the Reese's offerings: more peanut butter, less chocolate covering. I digress. These chocolate peanut butter filled cupcakes are just fantastic, and they're super simple to make. Just beware, they have a way of distracting you when you least expect it, and before you know it, you're eating another one. It's tricky, and I think that I ate the lion's share of these cupcakes.

Jam Filled Tea Cakes:

I've always been a sucker for nearly anything that has a dollop of jam inside. My very favorite Christmas cookies are thumbprints with strawberry jam in the middle. My mom used to make these every year at Christmas, and she'd ration them out because my brother and I couldn't be trusted around those cookies. I'm dying for the TWD group to pick Dorie's recipes for thumbprints at some point because I'd love to compare and contrast the two. Recently the SMS group made strawberry pink grapefruit preserves. These preserves were so tasty, and I had been pondering a dessert that would do them justice. Enter the tea cakes -- what a wonderful way to use up these scrummy preserves.

These tea cakes are definitely little cakes. The batter is some of the stiffest cake batter I've ever worked with. The process involves making the batter with the yolks, butter, and milk, then whipping the egg whites (each time I hit a recipe that calls for a second KA bowl I vow that someday I'll have an extra bowl), and folding the whites into the batter. The batter was so heavy that I just had a doozy of a time trying to fold in the egg whites, but in the end it seemed to be ok. The batter needs to be very stiff in order to make the little divot for the jam, after all.


The verdict on these? They are definitely tea cakes! These little cakes would be perfect with a cup of tea. My only complaint: I think that they're too big. I would definitely make these as minis rather than the full size cupcake. The cake itself is moist, but it's not the most flavorful cake, and these cupcakes rely on the jam to really deliver the goods. When I was done eating the part of the cake with the jam, I didn't quite know what to do with the rest of the cupcake. I think that minis would solve this problem quite nicely.