These decadent  chocolate cupcakes are filled with mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and topped with a peanut butter and chocolate buttercream icing, it’s a match made in heaven! The cupcakes themselves are very simple and quick to make. 

For the peanut butter icing it is important that you use a smooth peanut butter. The crunchy one doesn’t give you the right consistency and it will cause problems when trying to pipe it. There’s nothing worse than a lumpy icing that won’t come out of the bag correctly!

Makes 12 cupcakes

🛒 Ingredients 🛒 

For the cupcakes:

▪️175g butter

▪️175g caster sugar

▪️3 eggs

▪️125g self raising flour

▪️1 tsp baking powder

▪️40g cocoa powder

▪️2 tsp vanilla extract

▪️Reese’s mini peanut butter cups

For the icing:

▪️175g unsalted butter

▪️350g icing sugar

▪️30g cocoa powder

▪️4 tbsp peanut butter

▪️1 tsp vanilla extract

▪️2 tbsp milk

To decorate:

▪️70g melted chocolate

▪️Reese’s mini peanut butter cups

👩‍🍳 Method 👩‍🍳 

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Prepare your cupcake cases on a tray.
2. In a bowl cream together the butter and the sugar until pale. 
3. Add in one egg at a time and make sure you mix until it is fully combined before adding the next one. Then mix in the vanilla extract.
4. Next, sieve in the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and fold through until completely mixed in.
5. Scoop the cake batter into your prepared cases, about 2/3 full and add in two mini Reece’s peanut butter cups to each, making sure they are covered by batter.
6. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
7. Remove from the oven and leave too cool on a wire rack.  
8. To make the icing, beat the butter, peanut butter and vanilla in a bowl until it is pale. 
9. Add the icing sugar to the butter in stages, whisking in each addition fully. Once you have added all of the icing sugar, split the buttercream into two bowls and add the cocoa powder to one of them. Mix in the cocoa powder in fully so that there are no lumps.
10. Use the milk to get it to your desired consistency, you may not need all of the milk or any of it. The important thing is that you want to be able to pipe your buttercream so use the milk to loosen it up.
11. Place your chosen piping tip in the end of the bag and to get the two tone effect with the icing, you can do one of two things. Either put each icing into a separate bag and then insert both piping bags into your main bag that already has the nozzle ready or you can spoon the mixture into the same piping bag, keeping the two different colours separate. I find it best to squeeze the first bit of buttercream out so the two different types of icing are both coming out before you actually start.
12. Pipe the buttercream onto your cupcakes and top with more Reese’s mini peanut butter cups and a drizzle of melted chocolate.