Peanut Butter Cups

Here is our Christmas goodie plate this year. All the chocolate candies is a new route for me. I usually just reap the benefits of my friend Laura's peanut butter cups and truffles, but she's a long way away this year, so I'm having to make my own stuff. Sniff, sniff. This plate includes mini peanut butter cups, peppermint patties, and Oreo balls. I think I still have truffles and regular old Christmas sugar cookies on the list, but this plate needed to be given last night so this is what's included so far! I'll share the peanut butter cup recipe since it was very simple and used mostly locally available ingredients.

Peanut Butter Cups

1 cup peanut butter, divided

4 1/2 tsp butter, softened

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups (12 oz/340g) semi-sweet chocolate chips

4 milk chocolate candy bars (1.55 oz/44g each), coarsely chopped

In a small bowl, combine 1/2 cup peanut butter, butter, powdered sugar and salt until smooth, set aside. In a microwave, melt the chocolate chips, candy bars and remaining peanut butter, 30 seconds at a time. Stirring well after each 30 seconds. This should only take about 3 times total. Do NOT overheat the chocolate or it will harden really quickly. It is best to stir the last lumps in rather than feeling like you have to microwave them out.

Set out about 36 mini-paper liners or half that many of larger ones. Or, just use mini or regular size muffin pans--if you have the silicone kind, so they will pop out...otherwise I'm guessing you'd make them look not so nice trying to pry them out of metal muffin tins.

Drop teaspoonfuls of chocolate mixture into liners. Top each with a scant teaspoonful of peanut butter mixture. It should look similar to the above picture. At this point, I dipped my finger in powdered sugar and patted the top of each peanut butter drop to make it go a little into the chocolate and make a flatter top. Then, top each with another teaspoonful of chocolate mixture. Refrigerate until set. Store in airtight container. Yield: 3 dozen minis or about 18 regular sized.

Notes: I melted my chocolate mixture in 2 half batches so it wouldn't harden too much while I was doing the peanut butter centers. I probably put too much in the bottoms of mine, so the top layer of chocolate was thinner and I had some leftover in that batch. I only got about 30 mini liners filled on the bottom, but with the leftover chocolate from the top layer, I was able to make about 5 or 6 more as I still had some peanut butter for the center too. This really was a very quick process--no more than 30 or 40 minutes from start to finish--and the kids had fun helping mix the peanut butter part and setting out paper liners. If you wanted, kids would also have fun sprinkling the top with colored sprinkles or something like that. This was my first time to make these--and I liked the variation of having peanut butter in the chocolate. You could also just use milk chocolate rather than the semi-sweet to make them a little less rich. Or do like Reese's does and try other variations--dark chocolate, white chocolate, etc. This calls for chips, but chopping up a locally available chocolate bar made by Le Conte, Dove, Cadbury, etc will work fine. Just remember that any chocolate candies will only be as good at the chocolate you are putting in them! It makes a difference to use the good stuff rather than cutting corners for a truly "local" kind that might have lots of additives to the true chocolate. Going the extra mile and using the good stuff is what holiday cooking is about though, right?!?