Dead Man's Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Devil's Food & Dead Man's Peanut Butter Mousse
Slathered in chocolate fudge.
Oh yea.

We're revisiting my Dead Man's Peanut Butter Pie recipe today, with a few fun tweaks.

Today I found myself wrestling with a familiar peanut butter and chocolate craving. In such situations I have the following options:

1. Go to the store and buy all the available peanut butter cups. Of course, this isn't much of an option since getting out of the house with two small children and going anywhere requires nearly as much planning and preparation as a mission to Mars.
2. Eat peanut butter from jar with a spoon, dipping it into that 20lb bag of chocolate chips I have. Also not a great option, since with this method of consumption, any semblance of portion control vanishes and I just bought skinny jeans.
3. Bake something with peanut butter and chocolate for the blog, while wearing said skinny jeans and pretend that they will encourage restraint while tasting and testing.

I think we all know how this worked out.

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Spice financiers to kick off the holiday recipes

As said a couple of posts ago, I now start my holiday recipe series 2011 – I had so much fun in the previous years making these recipes I hoped I could do it again. I thought that star-shaped financiers would be a lovely way to begin – with all those delicious spices to boot – but I’ll be honest with you: the stracciatella ice cream in my freezer is the reason why I baked the little cakes. :)

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Simple orange cake (that got devoured in a couple of hours) + a lovely movie

I thought I was the only one around here who loves simple cakes, but apparently my coworkers share my opinion: this orange cake got devoured in a couple of hours and was elected their favorite baked good – who would imagine that orange could beat chocolate and caramel?

Speaking of favorites, I watched “Restless” last Saturday and absolutely loved it – sensitive, delicate, with nice dialogs,

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Oatmeal sandwich bread

While organizing my books on the new bookshelf I grabbed "Good to the Grain" and stared at its beautiful cover (those delicious rhubarb tarts!) for a few seconds... Then it suddenly hit me: I hadn’t used that book in ages; it’s one of my favorite books and that makes me wonder about the poor books I seldom or never use. Well, that’s just me. So I decided to make something – anything – from the

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Really good one-bowl chocolate chip pecan cookies - dead easy to make

I’ve been searching for inspiration for Christmas recipes – my plans are to make a series of recipes like last year’s – and a good place to start is Martha’s website; there are so many wonderful ideas there, everything’s so beautiful that the difficult part of it is choosing what to bake.

Going through some of her cookie recipes for the holidays I remembered that I hadn’t posted these

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Lemony nectarine cake + Bill Condon

I always say that a good director can get blood out of a stone – that is why I had a feeling that “Breaking Dawn” would be the best movie of the Twilight saga. I adore some of Bill Condon’s work – both "Gods and Monsters" and "Kinsey" are part of my list; he got a good performance out of Brendan Fraser – a miracle! – and made it possible for me to stand Beyonce and Eddie Murphy for two long

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Vanilla bean and blueberry mini cheesecakes

My initial idea was to make Nigella’s peanut butter cheesecake – that was why I bought several packages of cream cheese after all. Peanut butter cheesecake with a milk chocolate glaze... Yum, yum. But I had a surprise after opening the peanut butter jar: it was almost empty; I was furious for a couple of seconds then remembered that I’d had several spoonfuls of peanut butter lately. Too many, I

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Pink Peppermint Tea Cookies

In the kitchen baking once again. This time I've been bitten by the cookie bug. Or rather, I bit into a store bought peppermint tea cookie and thought I could do better. So I have! Besides, a batch of cookies are quite over due. I'm sure folks are starting to ponder their Christmas goodie-boxes and these are a festive play on those powdered tea cookie gems.

Besides, I have a gnome demanding cookies of me. And no, I won't explain that.

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Nigella’s everyday brownies

These are called “everyday brownies” but that doesn’t mean you can eat them every day – that would be nice, though. ;) Or you can just pretend you never read my post and eat them on a daily basis – who am I to judge, anyway?

For some reason the chocolate chips sank to the bottom of the pan, but let me assure you that it did not make much difference as far as flavor is concerned – it just

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Chestnut cakes with raisins, almonds and honey

After making Alice Medrich’s chestnut pound cake several times I thought I should find another recipe for my chestnut flour – that was when I found these adorable little cakes on one of my old Gourmet Traveller issues. They looked so perfect! I had to bake them. The cakes turned out incredibly tender – I had to be very careful while unmolding them – and delicious. I never thought I’d say that,

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Spicy tomato soup with crispy grilled cheese

I must start this post by saying that I love canned tomatoes – they’re a great pantry staple and I always have a couple of cans around. But even though I use them to make tomato sauce all the time I wasn’t very fond of the idea of using them to make soup – for absolute no reason, since I’d never tried canned tomato soup in my life. For a moment I thought “Oh my goodness, I’m becoming my husband

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Elvis Presley’s favorite pound cake + my role choices if I were an actress

I don’t have any talent for acting but if I’d become an actress I would be interested in complex roles, characters full of layers; I would not want to play the girl next door – no, sir; I would like to be Alex Forrest, Isabelle de Merteuil, Patricia Hewes (yes, I love Glenn Close), Ada McGrath, Marla Singer, Mary Magdalene, Sarah Pierce; Sister Aloysius Beauvier, Nina Sayers, Lisbeth Salander –

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Blueberry crumble and my love for crumbles

I’ve come to a conclusion: crumbles have become my favorite dessert. As much as I love ice cream and fruit tarts crumbles are now to me a synonym to feel-good-food. The flavors can vary from traditional to tropical, it doesn’t matter: crumbles make me happy. :)

I ate my first crumble in my late twenties and first made one myself in my early thirties, yet I feel that it could have easily become

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Tomato tart

Some things instantly remind me of others (and sometimes they’re related): the first time I watched "The Cell" – I know it sounds crazy that someone would watch a movie with J. Lo more than once, but Vincent D’Onofrio and the director made that possible – I found that the red “uniform” she wears (while getting into someone else’s mind) looked a lot like the medieval war armor Gary Oldman wears

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Dark and white chocolate cookies

No, these are not the traditional black & white cookies – but it was impossible for me not to think of Seinfeld after baking them.

Peace! :)

Dark and white chocolate cookies
from the always gorgeous Donna Hay Magazine

¼ cup (56g) unsalted butter, chopped
100g dark chocolate, chopped – I used one with 53% cocoa solids
½ cup (88g) brown sugar, packed
1 cup + 1 tablespoon (150g) all purpose

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