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.

Monday Musings.

Welcome to the very first edition of Monday Musings!

My brain is constantly jumbled with 101 different things.  I figure that my blog is a good place to put down all those ideas that are craft/party/recipe/etc related.  Monday Musings is going to be a list of everything that I'm thinking about or in the middle of creating.  As a huge fan of lists and this is an awesome way for me to have all of my thoughts and ideas in one place instead of in 50 different notebooks, various post it note strewn around my house or my personal favorite one word scrap pieces of paper that I can never decipher on what I was trying to remember. 

This is what is percolating in my brain this fine Monday morning...

• Marc's 30th Birthday Party.  That's right, my husband is turning the big 3-0.  We decided to have a party for "our" generation, meaning his cousins and friends.  We are leaving the older generation out for one very good reason, our house is way too small for the 66 people we would have had to invite.  I'm going to also have a little dinner with my parents and his parents so that we can celebrate the big day with them as well.  I love our theme idea....MUSTACHE BASH!  How fun!  I've gotten some really good ideas so far cruising the internet.  I have an awesome idea for his invitations but I'm still working that out  a bit so stay tuned.  We are having a mustache contest for best real or fake mustache or as I like to call them, "lip sweaters".  The prize is going to be a set of mustache glasses, so that when you drink out of them it appears as though you have a mustache.  I have the glasses, I just need to get the paint and a mustache stencil. 
• My First Blog Craft Project.  It's almost done!  It's a photo frame and that is all I'm saying!  I have two more pictures to take of it and hopefully I will post it tonight or tomorrow.
• My Ugly Couch.  I hate my couch, I loathe my couch, I don't even sit on my couch.  It's an ugly brown thing, the recliners don't work anymore so we don't use them.  I'm looking for an affordable (CHEAP!) way to cover this and make it look halfway decent before Marc's party in April.  Slip covers are super expensive and I hate spending almost $100 on that.  Any good ideas out there?
• Cupcakes.  Marc has requested cupcakes with peanut butter frosting for his birthday party and I was thinking that they would taste delicious with a jelly filling.  I have to try to find a recipe for this or how you do a cupcake with a filling.  My Cupcake Wars viewing on the Food Network has not covered this.  Hehehe.

There you have it, just a few of the thoughts rumbling in my brain.  I'd appreciate any feedback you can provide!