So here we are, you chose and I baked.  We’re such a good team.

Had some great learning experiences this round of baking, most of them garnered while swearing viciously at the batter, cupcake liners, and hand mixer for getting all over the place, not staying in the tin, and dragging its cord through the icing, respectively.

But before I bore you with the details: BEHOLD!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Don’t judge these cupcakes by the picture’s poor quality.  Most of them actually looked nicer than this, but most of them also went into the stomachs of my co-workers.  I made 2 dozen, and all but these lonely 4 found a home (or a way to their demise, however you want to look at it).  Also, it is pure coincidence that the icing seems to perfectly match my counter top…it’s like they were meant to be.

Anyway.

Verdict

Pretty durn good.  A bit crumbly, but otherwise DELICIOUS.  The cake was soft and moist (I thought the texture was perfect), the icing light and fluffy.  Some tasters felt that the peanut butter slightly overpowers the chocolate, but I felt that the balance was pretty good.  Perhaps next time I’ll go a little lighter on the icing.  I’ll eat another one later to double-check my feelings on the subject.  You know, for science.

From people at work I heard the comments, “delicious”, “very good”, “you’re a woman next to my heart” and “I think I’ll eat the whole thing”.  Pretty complimentary, IMO.

The one issue I did have, and I’m still not quite sure where it came from, is that the cakes themselves (not the icing) smelled like canola oil instead of chocolate. O.o  It made me a little concerned for their flavor, but apparently it was not adversely affected.  The only idea I can come up with for why they all reek of oil is that the canola oil I used had been sitting for awhile…perhaps it wasn’t fresh enough?  It couldn’t have gone bad; it would have made the cupcakes taste awful.  It’s a mystery…anyone have any ideas?

I need a new camera...

Things I Larn’d

1. Do not use a ladle to distribute your batter amongst your cupcake tin.  It gets batter everywhere and while it gets the job done, is largely annoying and creates a lot of mess.  Does anybody have suggestions on a better way to do this?
2. A regular butter knife does a great job of spreading icing.  I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out.  Ditch your rubber spatulas and use a plain ‘ole butter knife from now on!
3. When you’re pulling cupcake liners off of a pile, pull them from their bottoms, not from the open edges.  I deformed multiple liners by trying to pull them apart from the others from the edges.  Gently sliding them from the bottom ensures you won’t end up with lop-sided liners.
4. Don’t use ingredients that have been sitting in your pantry since god knows when.  Admittedly I don’t need canola oil that often, but that being the case I should really purchase smaller bottles of it so it doesn’t get old and nasty.  I know it may seem to go against the slacker code to buy new ingredients whenever you want them, but at some point you’re going to have to balance out the quality of your final product with a certain amount of work.

Thanks everybody for voting; come back next time!

Mary Gezo

Formerly of both n00bcakes and !Blog, the two magically become one on Spatialdrift; expect some lazy baking and serious nerditude. Also, I love semicolons.