Peanut butter and chocolate in a cup!

Have I mentioned how much I love any combination of chocolate and peanut butter? The Peanut Butter smoothie at Jamba Juice is always what I purchase. I will eat all of the Peanut Butter Cups out my sister's Halloween candy before she notices my hand is in the bucket.

And I make peanut butter cookies with a Hershey's Kiss on top frequently.



You can't tell from this picture (I must remember to take the picture from another angle!), but these cookies are actually in the shape of a cup. Because I bake them in mini cupcake pans. I like to bake them this way for a few reasons: 1) there's a uniformity to the cookies; 2) I know exactly how much to make each ball of dough; and, 3) I know exactly how many cookies I will get out of this process (the following recipe yields 48 cookies made in the mini cupcake pans).

Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1-1/4 flour
honey, if dough proves to be too dry

48 chocolate kisses (or mini peanut butter cups)

Preheat the oven to 325*F. Cream together the butters, sugars, vanilla and egg. Add in the salt, soda and flour. The dough should naturally clump together away from the walls of the mixing bowl. If it doesn't, then add more flour. If the dough is crumbly, add some honey.

Coat the bottom each cupcake slot with non-stick spray. Roll a pinch of dough into a ball slightly bigger than a quarter and place in cupcake slot. Bake one tray at a time, at 325*F for nine minutes (or ten minutes if you add honey). Take pan out of oven immediately, place pan on cooling rack, and nestle a chocolate kiss in each cookie.

Remove the cookie when cooled completely.

Speaking of cakes for men...

...I made this one for one of the guys at work for his birthday.



I think it's very pretty, but I didn't say so to him. Wouldn't you want this cake if you were a gouty 38 year old man?

As for specifics, this is a Devil's food chocolate cake that I baked in a regular bundt pan. It baked fairly flat so I didn't need to level it. It's covered in a semi-sweet chocolate ganache (my first *ever*) and white cookie drizzle frosting. And left over fondant daisies that I had made two months before for a different cake. (Shh! Don't tell. And you should be eating fondant anyway, it's gross.) The yellow centers are yellow cookie drizzle frosting.

This is how I made the ganache:

I took four squares of baker's cocoa, slightly melted, and mixed with 1/4 cup of heavy cream until unified. Then I added white sugar to taste and poured it over the cake immediately. I kept going in circles around the cake until I used it all up, that's why there's a puddle in the middle.