Peanut Butter Chocolate Cupcakes

These peanut butter chocolate caupcakes are from Betty Crocker's The Big Book of Cupcakes and I've wanted to make them for a while now.  I love the peanute butter + chocolate combination.  Whoever originally thought to put chocolate and peanut butter together was a genius. 

I went home last weekend and some family came for a visit, and I decided to finally make these.  Up until now, I haven't really deviated from the standard vanilla and chocolate cakes.  So I was excited to try these and make something different.

I have one word for these cupcakes.  EASY.  So easy.

I love that The Big Book of Cupcakes tells you how to make all the recipes with a box mix and not just from scratch. 

Ingredients:

1 yellow cake mix

1 1/4 cups water

1/4 oil

3 eggs

3/4 creamy peanut butter

Frosting:

The recipe calls for 1 container of store bought chocolate frosting with 1/4 cup creamy peanut butter. I usually tend to run out of frosting so I bought two containers and just added a couple large spoonfuls of peanut butter.  The cupcakes smelled extremely peanut-buttery while they were baking and I didn't want the chocolate frosting to be too peanut-buttery too.  I wanted there to be an even balance of chocolate and peanut butter. 

 I've been waiting a while to use these paper liners too!  I have a set of them in a few different colors and I haven't really used any of them.  Unfortunately, I couldn't really see the design on it after the cupcakes were done baking.  They're still pretty cute, though.

For the topping, I crushed up some chocolate chips and some Reese's peanut butter chips and put them in a bowl.  After I piped some icing on the cupcakes, I dopped the frosting into the crushed up chips.  They went really well with the cupcakes!

I'm trying to work on my photography! :)