I wanted to make some sweet treats for my friends birthday party in September. As she is a huge peanut butter fan, I was looking for an adequate recipe to fulfill her wish. As I scored with my version of the Irish car bomb cupcakes at her last party I searched for a peanut buttery alternative on the same blog (which is one of my favourites anyway). And there they were, Dark chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting, I fell for them at first glance.

I took a day off from work to enjoy a whole day of baking fun. I went shopping for ingredients, got out my measures, arranged everything on my kitchen counter and started my baking day. I started to follow the recipes instructions, but using my simmering pan with thermometer and not letting the temperature of the chocolate mixture rise to more than 50°C (which is a good tip that I learned at a praline course I took because like that the chocolate won’t get burned). I prepared the dough, transferred it into my muffin pan and into the hot oven.

I don’t know what exactly happened to the cupcakes in the oven but instead of rising at least a little in height, they only rose in width.
I cooled them for some time before trying to remove them from the muffin pan but the tops broke and most of the cupcakes came out in crumbles. I could save at least 4 cupcakes from breaking but when I got them out of the pan, the paper cups remained in the pan. It was a complete massacre of chocolatety cupcake crumbles and paper cups…
I first blamed the recipe and tried to figure out what to do instead. I suspect my oven to be the point of failure because afterwards, baking another cake at the same temperature, it took twice the baking time for the cake to finish plus the spare cupcakes with a proved and tested recipe were pretty much the same…

I wanted to make some additional Cake Pops anyway so the crumbles were a good thing to start with. So I made the peanutbutter frosting from the recipe and mixed my cupcake crumbles with half of the frosting to get a moist Cake Pop basis. They were amazing!

Cakepops are a fantastic possibility to cover up baking fails. They are ridicoulously easy to make, any flavour can be added and they can be styled from thrifty to fancy. All you need is some time, especially for cooling and different icings or decorations. But they look very good on a buffet and have a perfekt bite size.