Guest Blogger: Simple Sweetness

We are so excited to have our first Guest Blogger today. When we saw Leslie's post about her Pb & J mini cupcakes both of our mouths dropped. We are so happy to share Leslie and her blog Simple Sweetness with you today:

Thank you to Mom's of all Trades for letting me share my recipe and blog today!

Hi Everyone!  My name is Leslie and my blog is called Simple Sweetness.

I'm 28, married to the wonderful Marc, work in customer service, had gastric banding surgery in 2009 (lost 90lbs so far, yay!), go to school for Medical Billing & Coding, love all things Disney, read A LOT, I'm on my 23rd book of 2011 and of course I love to be crafty. 

Simple Sweetness is my attempt at keeping life simple & sweet.  I'm sure that was pretty obvious but just in case.  LOL.  Simple Sweetness is about about my home life, which means cooking, decorating, home improvement projects and just about any craft project I come across that appeals to me.  I'm not very confident in the kitchen but lately I have been cooking up a storm, at least for me. I'm going to share my very yummy Peanut Butter & Jelly Mini Cupcakes.  I'm quite proud of them, I came up with the idea for my husband's 30th Birthday party next month. 

Peanut Butter & Jelly Mini Cupcakes.

Of course you can make full size cupcakes with this recipe too.

Supplies:

*Yellow or White Cake Mix & Ingredients to Make Mix

*Vanilla Frosting

For the 5 dozen Mini Cupcakes I made, I used almost 2 cans of 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.

 I used my new Dessert Decorator Plus for filling and frosting the cupcakes.
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.

Filled with Grape Jelly. 

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.

 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'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 they sound, a sweet peanut butter & jelly sandwich in cupcake form. 

Delicious!

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my cupcakes and thanks again to Mom's of all Trades for sharing their blog with me!

Leslie from Simple Sweetness.