Peanut Butter Cups, and Vegan!

Reese's peanut butter cups are very delicious to a lot of people. It is hard to find a version without milk products in it. In a moment of brilliance, Bree suggested making our own and not only were they awesome but they made me feel my favorite: really fancy! Check it out:

The above photo is an extreme close-up. The size of these cups are about 1 cubic inch, or, the size of a scantly-filled mini cupcake.

An unhelpful fun fact: I actually prefer the "pieces" of Reese's; the bite-sized candy coated version of the peanut butter cup. Me and E.T. would make great friends! It's true! And, I know this makes me a weird outcast and makes you wonder, "Then why are you posting this blog?", but these peanut butter cups were so good that you don't need to like the original!

For the outside, melt:
1 1/2 C chocolate chips, melted
A dash of soymilk for flavor
and cupcake wrappers (I am using a miniature cupcake pan, so I have mini paper wrappers)

For the filling, melt:
3/4 C Peanut Butter
1-3 Tbsp powdered sugar (or to taste)

These cups are made in three steps and in between each step, they are placed in the refrigerator to cool and harden. No baking needed! So, first: Heat the chocolate. You can microwave it, or do it on the stove top in a sauce pan (which I did), just be careful not to let the chocolate get too hot because it will burn. If it burns, turn the heat lower.

Once soft, use a spoon to put a dollop of chocolate into the cupcake wrapper. The chocolate will cool pretty quickly so work diligently to spread the chocolate so it covers the entire bottom of the wrapper and spreads up the sides a little. This is creating a kind of chocolate shell to hold in the peanut butter. There should be some chocolate left over to use as the "lid" for these cups. So leave it  warming once your little wrappers have their bottoms. Set these in the fridge to cool until hard.

Soften the peanut butter and the powdered sugar in another saucepan while the first phase is cooling in the fridge. Taste test the peanut butter filling to make sure it is sweet to your liking and also that it is soft enough to be squished into place. Once chocolate has cooled take the pan out of the fridge and put a small spoonful of peanut butter in each cup. After making sure I there was some peanut butter in each cup I went back a lightly pressed it down into the chocolate, making sure to leave enough room in each for the chocolate topping. Set in fridge to cool.

And last, but not least, finish off the peanut butter cups with the last of the melted chocolate. Use the spoon to smooth out the tops and make sure they extend to each side of the paper wrappers. Cool again. After this, it's all done! The explanation took a long time, but the process is fairly straight-forward. Chocolate layer. Cool. Peanut butter layer. Cool. Chocolate layer. Cool. Eat!

Cutting these peanut butter cups in half shows off the layering. It is very pretty to me. My mini cupcake tin only allows for 12 treats at once which turned out to be plenty. These little guys are rich, sweet and very satisfying. Keep them in the fridge for storage. They melt more quickly than your average, shelf stable, store-bought version.