On Peanut Butter Cups

An essential winter treat

Welcome to the Friday Recipe post for paid subscribers! This homemade peanut butter cup recipe is one of the classics in my house. Next Friday, paid subscribers will receive another edition of Cookbook Chronicles. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!

I’m a notoriously boring person in one very important way: I don’t have a sweet tooth. If I’m offered a piece of cake or a bag of potato chips, I’m taking the potato chips every time. And yet, when I share recipes, they’re most often for sweet treats. How, you may be asking yourself, does that happen and why should I trust a recipe for dessert from one who so strongly prefers salty snacks?

When I’m cooking, I’m riffing endlessly, making wild alterations to whatever semblance of a plan I had. This does not lend itself well to sharing those recipes with you all. When I’m baking, I’m following a recipe: whether one of my own, one that I’m reading out of a cookbook, or one that I almost know by heart from a folded index card handed down from my grandma. This obsession means that I carefully note when I make alterations and have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what you can, should, and definitely don’t do when making desserts. I have a pathological need to bake. I love making sweets. Perhaps this is rooted deep in my history as a recipe developer/baker/food obsessive. Perhaps it’s rooted in the people I love who happen to have sweet tooths (sweet teeth?). Perhaps it’s to balance all of the salt I eat.

So, welcome to an era of sweet recipes. I’ll try to plug in a few savory treats, but over the next few weeks, we’re going deep into desserts: chocolate mousse, the best chocolate cake, and more. Buckle up!

Tips

• If you don’t have mini muffin tin liners, it’s worth the time and effort to put a little piece of parchment paper in each muffin tin. The last thing you want standing in between you and homemade peanut butter cups is melted chocolate that’s stuck to a tin. If you use the parchment paper, make sure to cut each piece long enough that you can use the paper to pop the entire candy out of the tin. Easy peasy!

• This recipe feels endlessly riff-able to me. Don’t like dark chocolate? Use white chocolate or caramel. Peanut butter not your jam? What about almond or pistachio or tahini, even? Like a chunkier texture? Roast up some peanuts, chop them up, and fold them into the peanut butter mixture.

• In case melting chocolate is a new adventure for you, take it from one who has made this mistake before: DO NOT just zap chocolate chips for a minute in the microwave by themself. The trick to melting chocolate in the microwave them slowly: five to ten seconds at a time, with lots of stirring. Also, adding coconut oil makes it much easier. I myself don’t own a microwave (!), so I use a double boiler. Once you’ve nailed melting chocolate, you can continue your career as a confectioner with these coconut chocolate bars.

Homemade Peanut Butter Cups

The way this ancient image makes me drool.