Peanut Butter & Jelly Mini Cupcakes

I mentioned on Monday that I was going to be testing Peanut Butter & Jelly Mini Cupcakes.  Marc requested them for his 30th Birthday Party which will be on April 9th.  I wanted to test these out but not have a bunch of cupcakes in my house so with Marc going to Vermont with a bunch of his guy friends today, last night was the perfect time to make them.

Supplies:

*Yellow or White Cake Mix & Ingredients to Make Mix

*Vanilla Frosting

*Creamy Peanut Butter

*Jelly

*Filling Tip

*Decorating Tip

*Mini Cupcake Liners

Not everything is pictured here, sorry!

I first made the cake mix and lined my mini cupcake pan.  Then popped the pan in the oven.  I followed the box directions for oven temp and cooking time. 

FYI: Because I made mini cupcakes, they took less than the 20 minutes for full size cupcakes.  Just keep an eye on yours while they bake.

 While my Mini Cupcakes baked, I got out my new Dessert Decorator, which rocks!  I hate the frosting bags so I spotted this and decided to give it a whirl.  I bought mine for $14.99 at Michael's.  Well worth the $15 because it had a filling tip and the decorating tips.  Plus you just wash out the tube, no messy frosting bags, no frosting coming out the bottom.  Can you tell I like this? 

Filled with Reduced Sugar Grape Jelly. 

 I only have one Mini Cupcake pan so it took awhile to cook the 5 batches.  I still had cake mix leftover too so I could have made more but it was a work night and with one pan, I was ready to be done.

While I was baking and waiting for the cupcakes to cool, I mixed my Peanut Butter Frosting.

I took the lazy easy way out.  I just used vanilla frosting and mixed peanut butter into it.  There are tons of from scratch peanut butter frosting recipes on the internet so google that if you want to do it homemade. 

If you go the method I used, melt your peanut butter in the microwave for 15 seconds.  I had to do mine another 10 seconds, just be careful because you can burn the peanut butter.

I mixed in about 1 tablespoon of peanut butter at time until I got the right flavor.  Don't worry about doing too much or too little, mix in until you have the peanut butter flavor you want.

I did about 3 tablespoons to 1 can of Vanilla Frosting.

I did have a frosting emergency, one can for this many mini cupcakes (5 dozen) was not enough. Marc had to go out in the middle of me frosting the cupcakes to get more frosting.  Oops!

 Filling the cupcakes were super easy with my dessert decorater.  I let the cupcakes cool for about 5 to 10 minutes.  These being mini cupcakes, they cooled down super fast.  With larger cupcakes you might have to wait a bit longer.

  The directions said to insert the fill tip about 1 inch but as there were mini cupcakes, I didn't quite go down that far.  These were the first ones I filled and about halfway through I learned that if I pulled the plunger back a bit before I removed the tip from the cupcake then it wouldn't leave the bubble of jelly at the top you see in the picture below.  The ones with no jelly on top have not been filled yet. 

 The bummer about having only one Dessert Decorater tube is that I had to wait for all 5 batches of cupcakes to cook, cool and fill with jelly before I could switch over to my Peanut Butter Frosting.

I will be sure to buy another mini cupcake pan before Marc's Party.

I'm not a great froster so I tried to do a smooth "bubble" or "dot" of frosting.  To do this, hold your tube at a 90 degree angle in the center of your cupcake and frost until you have the size frosting you desire.  I think if I had backed off the tube a little before removing I wouldn't have had such a wispy tail on the end of the cupcakes.

Ta Da!  Peanut Butter & Jelly Cupcakes.

They are just like the sound, a sweet peanut butter & jelly sandwich in cupcake form.  Delicious!

Things I would do differently next time are....

*Try full sugar jelly and probably strawberry jelly instead of grape. 

I just used what we had at home for these ones.

*Use 2 mini cupcake pans to get the baking done faster.

*Have 2 cans of frosting on hand so no running to the store in the middle of frosting.

I'm already brainstorming ideas for another flavor of cupcakes for the party in April. 

I think two flavors would be nice to have.  Any suggestions?

Linking up to these Parties.