This week, I took a much-needed break from cupcakes. I haven’t made cookies in a couple of months, so I thought I’d find an interesting recipe and go with it. I really wanted to make some kind of sandwich cookie, and when I found the recipe for Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies, I knew I’d found the right one!

The recipe started as a pretty standard chocolate chip cookie recipe, but with peanut butter added:

The dough was scooped out into small balls and placed on My Precious:

While the cookies baked and cooled, I mixed up peanut butter, chocolate chips and powdered sugar. Then I boiled some heavy cream and poured it over the peanut butter mixture, stirring until everything melted and became smooth. This mixture went into the fridge for about an hour until it reached a spreadable consistency:

Cooled cookies:

Once the chocolate was spreadable, I spread it over a flat half of a cookie and sandwiched another on top:

These cookies turned out quite good. The peanut butter wasn’t as pronounced as it would be in just a regular peanut butter cookie, and the peanut butter/chocolate sauce in the middle of the cookies was heavenly. I typically don’t care for the peanut butter/chocolate combo, but that sauce was just fantastic. My co-workers were equally impressed.

The only issue I had with the cookies is that while they were in the fridge overnight, three of my cookies sort of slid apart. That is to say, that the cookies wouldn’t sit flat because of the placement of the chips and the top of the cookies slid almost completely off the bottoms. There was no rescuing these cookies as the chocolate had hardened, so they were the ones I left for Rob. Oh well, the rest of them turned out fine.

One of my co-workers specifically requested blueberry muffins with crumb topping this week, as Crumbs Bakery apparently didn’t make them for four days in a row. A blog post about these muffins will be coming shortly.

By now, I’ve spoiled my new co-workers something awful. Every Friday around 2 p.m. when I come in, they’re all waiting for me at the door, a hungry look in their eye and a little drool on their lips. I’ve already had a few requests come in, so this week I decided to honor one.

One of the guys at my work whom everyone calls Archives, asked me to bake something with pineapple in it. It’s a running joke at work that Archives is a little bonkers for pineapple (and ketchup, but that’s another story). When he asked, I immediately thought of pineapple upside down. I’ve never made one, but I figured doing a cupcake version couldn’t be that difficult.

I started with a few cans of pineapple chunks, which were drained of their liquid and then left to drain a little more on paper towels:

Next, I mixed up some light brown sugar with melted butter to make a syrup for what would become the tops of the cupcakes:

This syrup was evenly distributed among the cupcake tins:

And then the pineapple chunks were decoratively placed on top of the syrup:

Finally, a pretty straightforward cupcake batter was mixed to be poured on top of the pineapple and syrup. The recipe didn’t even include vanilla, which I added to give it just a bit more flavor. The batter was poured on and the cupcakes were baked. Once they had baked, I cooled them in the tins for a few minutes and then wrestled with a cooling rack to flip the tins upside down and release the cakes. It worked for the most part. A few pineapple chunks stuck to the tins, so I had to pull them out and stick them back on the cakes:

These weren’t my favorite cupcake…they were a little sticky and the cake was just a touch too bland. I had the option of using either milk or reserved pineapple juice for the batter, and I went with the milk. Maybe I should have went with the juice. At any rate, my co-workers gobbled them down and Archives told me that I should divorce my husband and marry him just so I could bake these all the time for him.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to stick with the husband I’ve got, but thanks for the compliment, Archives.

This week I baked Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies, which I will be posting about soon. I’m trying to get back on track and post things the weekend after I bake, but we’re still unpacking and getting settled, so my schedule is still wonky.

More cupcakes up this week! I’ve been dying to make a pink lemonade cupcake for quite some time, so I decided it was finally time to do it. The recipe I found online seemed fairly simple and the pink color was extra cute. My co-workers seemed skeptical of a pink lemonade cupcake when I told them about it, so I knew I had to do it up right.

The recipe started with a batter that combined flour, sugar, vegetable oil, egg whites, buttermilk, red food coloring and thawed frozen pink lemonade concentrate (as well as a few other staples). The pink lemonade concentrate added a great lemony touch to the finished product, but lost a little of its tartness in the baking process:

The cupcakes baked up beautifully, although they weren’t as pink as I’d hoped. I added a few more drops of red food coloring to the remaining batter for the next round:

Second batch:

I felt like the frosting was the real star of this cupcake. The original recipe called for just a buttercream frosting, with powdered sugar, salt, vanilla and butter, but I felt like it was too bland. So I added a few tablespoons of the pink lemonade concentrate until it achieved a slightly tart flavor, and then a few drops of red food coloring to make it pink. Perfect:

The frosted cupcakes turned out quite cute:

My co-workers enjoyed them and became pink lemonade cupcake believers. These ones were gone within twenty minutes.

This week I also whipped up some Lemon Cupcakes for my husband’s cousin’s 40th birthday party. The cupcakes themselves turned out great, but my frosting was really weird. It never achieved the smoothness I was looking for, but stayed slightly curdled and spread on the cupcakes more like butter than frosting. It tasted great, but just looked a little weird:

Last week I baked Pineapple Upside Down Cupcakes, which I will be posting soon.

After taking in last week’s S’mores Cupcakes to my coworkers, one of them, Colleen, requested something with caramel. So I came home and started doing some research to find a good caramel-y dessert. I didn’t want to just make the Salted Caramel cupcakes again, so I found a recipe for these Caramel Apple cupcakes and it looks awesome.

The recipe used applesauce rather than chopped apples. If I ever make these again, I might consider using applesauce and some chopped apples just to amp up the apple flavor:

The wet ingredients were added to a flour mixture that included a heavenly mix of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Mmm mmm!

The batter was scooped into cupcake tins:

Once the cupcakes had cooled, I melted down some caramel candy cubes in a saucepan. Once they were melting, I added in some heavy cream to get a smooth, buttery caramel sauce, which was spread over the tops of my cooled cupcakes:

As soon as the caramel went down, I dipped the tops of several of them in chopped Reese’s Pieces or M&Ms, to mimic the chopped peanuts or chocolate that you might find on a fair-style caramel apple:

They were so beautiful! I was so proud of myself:

And then the next day happened. The recipe instructs the baker to store the cupcakes at room temperature. Which I did. The next morning when I got up and checked on them, the caramel had melted and oozed down the cupcakes. The toppings went with them. They weren’t ruined; there was still caramel on the cupcakes, but it was melty and no longer that shiny veneer of caramel. I was so disappointed.

My coworkers, however, loved them. Colleen was thrilled that I’d brought in something caramel, as she much prefers it over chocolate.

This past Friday, I baked Pink Lemonade cupcakes, which I will be posting about sometime mid-next week. Tomorrow I will be baking some more cupcakes and on Monday we are finally (finally!) moving into our new apartment in Brooklyn. That will take up some of my time, but I promise to post before I bake my birthday cupcakes on Friday!