Homemade Peanut Butter Cups

Written by: Sapphire Faerie

Do you like eating chocolate peanut butter cups? Ever wish they were bigger, or that you could make your own? Ever wish you could totally change the ingredients or add new stuff to your cups? Well I've got the perfect recipe for you to try!

Ingredients and materials needed:

chocolate chips

peanut butter

paper muffin liners

muffin pan

Those are the ingredients for the standard plain peanut butter cups. Start with about 12 ounces of chocolate chips. If you haven't melted enough for the amount of cups you want to make, you can always melt more. But if you melt too much, you can't really do much with the leftovers.

The first step is to line the muffin pan with the paper liners. Once that's done, set it aside. Now you want to melt the chocolate. There's two ways of going about this. You can melt it on the stove by using a double boiler, or in the microwave.

If you use the stove, never put the chocolate in a pan directly on the heat, it will burn. A double boiler is one pan suspended over another. The chocolate goes in the top pan, and the bottom one goes directly on the burner and has water in it. The water in the bottom pan boils and the heat from it melts the chocolate in the top pan.

If you use the microwave, go slowly, stopping to stir it every minute or so until it's melted.

Once your chocolate is melted, pour a little bit of it into the bottom of each muffin liner. Now take your peanut butter and put some in each muffin liner, on top of the chocolate. Peanut butter is very sticky and can be pretty hard to work with. Spread it in as best as you can, but don't spread it all the way against the sides of the liners.

Once that's done, the chocolate left in the bowl might've already start to set, so you might have to re-melt it. Once that's done, pour the remaining chocolate on top of the peanut butter. It should spread down between the peanut butter and the paper to form the walls of the chocolate cup. Once each cup is filled up, you can use your spoon to smooth out the top of the chocolate on each one.

(Note: You don't want the chocolate to be too thick in any area or it'll be too hard to bite into.)

Now stick the whole pan in the refrigerator so it can set. Once the chocolate has hardened, you can take them out and serve them.

Now comes the fun part! Substitutions!

'Chocolate not your thing? You can buy butterscotch or peanut butter chips instead, or white chocolate. If you do like chocolate, you can use milk chocolate, dark chocolate, or semi-sweet chocolate. If you really wanted to try something fun, you could use one type of chocolate for the bottom of the cups, and another for the top.

As for fillings, creamy peanut butter is the standard... but you can use crunchy if you'd like! Or you can mix some honey into it for a different flavour. Perhaps, toss in some mini marshmallows, or marshmallow creme on top of the peanut butter before topping it with chocolate. Or try caramel! Maybe you could forgo the peanut butter altogether and just fill each cup with marshmallow creme or caramel.

How about a suprise in each cup? You could hide a small candy in the middle of each one, inside the peanut butter: a gummy bear, a maraschino cherry, or pieces of a cut up candy bar.

Just go wild with your creations and enjoy!