Peanut Butter Buttercream

Seriously, what three words could sound better? “You won the lottery…” nope, that’s four and therefor doesn’t count! Peanut Butter Buttercream wins!

This past weekend a good friend of mine hosted a “Bloggers Unite” party where by a group of 10-15 girlies in the area who are all great athletes and bloggers (and appreciators of dessert) got together to meet up! I found this wildly entertaining because nobody actually knew each other… just knew each others blog and “tweets”. I have to say that everyone who showed up were pretty cool ladies and it was very cool to meet the people you’ve been reading about for a while.

So, knowing that this grand event was upon us, I thought cupcakes were in order! And what athlete doesn’t like peanut butter? Try putting scoops of peanut butter on your banana and eat that for a recovery snack (let me know how that goes)! Since I didn’t want to overkill the cupcakes with peanut butter AND bananas, I went with the good ol’ rich chocolate cupcake instead of a banana bread style cupcake; no one seemed to mind.

The morning started off with mixing up the butter and sugars, and then adding in the eggs.

In a separate bowl I organized the dry ingredients including my coco powders.

Mix it all together and you get…

Voilà!

Seriously it took a lot, I will repeat that one more time A LOT of restraint to not completely devour the entire batch of chocolate batter, and thus the batter did make it into the cupcake pans!

While they were baking it was time to start the experimentation with my new project… “Project Master Peanut Butter Buttercream”. This project started out much the same as many other buttercreams start out, egg whites & white sugar meet double boiler! Once the egg mixture has been whisked until the candy thermometer says 160°F pour into standing mixer equipped with the whisk attachment and whip on high! You are done when the meringue can hold stiff peaks.

From here I contemplated the amount of butter to put into the buttercream recipe because I would also be adding peanut butter and I didn’t want to add too much of either such that I would loose the lightness of the buttercream. So I added only half the butter I usually would for this ratio and substituted the other half of the butter with the peanut butter! Seriously folks, this stuff was the sheeze! I added a concerning amount of peanut butter but it didn’t end up effecting the consistency and the flavor was de-lish! As well I used crunchy peanut butter; the jury is still out on if I would use crunchy again.  It certainly wasn’t a bad move, but I’m pondering how the velvety texture would compare to the buttercream with a little peanut crunch! Too bad I couldn’t offer you a free sample right through your computer screen!

Somehow I didn’t manage to get a picture of the buttercream piped out onto the cupcake before I dunked them into their ganache topping. That’s right, I said “their ganache topping”. So I’ll skip right ahead to the goodness of ganache!

It was like one giant warm Reese's peanut butter cup on top of the chocolate cupcake!

Now you have to remember back to the beginning of this post and that the whole point of making these cupcakes was for our girls night, and I felt the cupcakes just looked a little sad without any bling to jazz them up…so I added what every girl loves. Stilettos! That’s right SHOES! Don’t roll your eyes gentlemen, you know your lady’s legs just look that much hotter with a pair of high heels on her tootsies!

 

Sad & Shoeless cupcakes

Happy Feet Cupcakes!

 

I assume the ladies liked the cupcakes since I didn’t have to take any home with me!

And that’s all for this post because I’m currently busy in the kitchen working on my next cake project. I’m paired up with an organization called Icing Smiles, and I’ll be baking a cake customized for a family who has a young child undergoing continuous medical care. I won’t give away all of the details now, you’ll have to come back on Monday to see the cake and hear this young boys story!

‘Till then, enjoy!

Posted in: Buttercream, Chocolate, Cupcake, Occasions, Peanut Butter