Peanut Butter and Jam Cupcakes

Marlena over at The Repressed Pastry Chef is an incredible baker. So when she said she had found the best plain cake recipe of all time, I definitely took notice. When she tried this recipe, she made Napoleon cupcakes. I decided to make peanut butter and jam cupcakes out of mine.

The recipe for the cake is here. All in all, I think it's a good recipe, the cakes turned out really light and fluffy, but I think I prefer the golden cupcakes recipe from the book Crazy About Cupcakes which I used last time. For some reason, whenever I make recipes using cake flour instead of all purpose flour, they come out a little on the dry side. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

The cupcakes as a whole came out awesome though. Definitely some of the best ones I've made and they disappeared in a hurry. Seriously, I barely got a picture of these three. The recipe made three dozen regular cupcakes and a dozen minis, and I only have ten cupcakes left an hour after making them. I took some to my Mom's office, BF took some in to work and the neighbours stopped by for a couple. That's really good though, I'd much rather give them away while they're fresh than have them get stale.

The frosting is a peanut butter buttercream, here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (salted, room temperature)
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1/2 large bag of icing sugar (500g)
5 1/2 Tbsp milk

Beat butter and peanut butter on low until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes). Alternate adding icing sugar about 3/4 cup at a time, and adding milk 1 Tbsp at a time, beating until combined after each addition. You may need more or less milk to get a nice consistency. The frosting is pale in colour, so add a little brown icing colouring to it if you want it to be the colour of peanut butter.

The filling is a half and half mixture of vanilla custard (using BF's secret recipe) and raspberry jam.

I had a really tough time filling these cupcakes. I tried to pipe it in but I couldn't seem to get enough filling in each cupcake, and then when I tried squeezing harder, the icing bag blew up and I had raspberry filling all over the place. Luckily it only got all over four of the cupcakes. I couldn't help but laugh.

After that didn't work, what I ended up doing was to use a 1" round cookie cutter to punch a circle into the top of the cupcake about an inch deep. I slid a knife under the circle and popped it out. I sliced a small layer off the bottom of the section I pulled out, spooned about 1 tsp of the filling into the cupcake, and replaced the section I had cut out. It was actually surprisingly fast to do once I got going, and each cupcake was perfectly filled. The frosting hid the seam of where I had replaced the plug.

I'm really happy with how these ones turned out, and would definitely make them again!