Homemade peanut butter cups (for Halloween)

Are you a fan of Pinterest?  I love checking out the "Food & Drink" category.  There are amazing photos of all kinds of food and sweets (not to mention cool tips and tricks) to ogle over.  Plus, it's nice to know there are so many people like me, who are obsessed with food!  I've actually tried a couple of recipes I found via Pinterest and this one came about the same way.

Homemade peanut butter cups caught my attention partly because I thought my little one would enjoy it.  With Halloween around the corner, I also can't help but have candy bars on my mind, especially since they're everywhere right now.  And once in a while, I just get a hankering to try making homemade copies of store bought things - even though it usually ends up reminding me there's a good reason why the item is best store bought.

With Halloween in mind, I sprinkled some black and orange nonpareils over some of my peanut butter cups.  Why not add different kind of sprinkles for whatever holiday you're celebrating.  Kids are big fans of sprinkles and they were the first of my little batch to go.  But I'm not suggesting you make these to pass out on Halloween...I actually don't think that would be practical (please read on)...

To make these, you layer chocolate, peanut butter whipped with a bit of butter and confectioners' sugar, then chocolate again, in some cupcake liners.  Freeze each layer for about 15 minutes and before you know it, unwrap your liners and you have homemade peanut butter cups.  It's not exactly Reese's Pieces but I really like being able to see the layers of chocolate and peanut butter, and I think it's a fun little project to do if you're into making homemade renditions of store bought candy.

For the chocolate, I used a mix of (mostly) semisweet and milk chocolate.  You could use what you prefer; milk chocolate would be sweeter and should give you a softer texture than dark.  I used standard cupcake size wrappers to make my peanut butter cups.  You could go mini, using a mini muffin tin and liners.  That would be a little more labor intensive but looking back now, I actually think minis would've been a better idea.  Since these tend to melt (you need to store them in the refrigerator, the chocolate is not tempered) and be a bit messy to eat, it'd be a big plus to be able to pop one whole piece into your mouth! 

Overall, this was a fun little project.  The plus side is you made very tasty homemade peanut butter cups!  The downside is you can't really transport these since they're a little messy to handle.  They start sweating and melting on your fingers once taken out of the refrigerator - and you do need to let them rest a few minutes at room temperature before eating so that the chocolate layers aren't quite so hard (those chocolate layers are purely melted chocolate, with no butter or corn syrup to soften them).  In contrast, the peanut butter layer is softer than the chocolate and tends to squish out when you bite into it. 

To contain the mess a little, I think it's a good idea to serve each one of these in a cupcake wrapper so that there's something to hold onto.  But hey, store bought candy can be messy too, right?

The kids I served these to needed a lot of napkins but they were very happy (which makes me happy)!  Now if only there was a recipe for homemade Kit Kat bars...