Unwrapped: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (recipe)

Hi! I hope you all had a great Easter yesterday! We had a glorious celebration at our church and I’m still basking in the afterglow of it -what a joyful day!  Today, I am kicking off a fun new series Unwrapped: Favorite Snack Recipes.  This is for all the junk food lovers out there!  But selfishly, I’m doing this series mostly for me, because I have the biggest sweet tooth and I love the challenge of deconstructing my favorite foods.  Plus, homemade is usually cheaper, yummier and healthier than the packaged counterparts.  And  I’ve discovered  that recreating our favorite snacks is not as hard as it seems!  You just have to be a little creative and have some free time.

Today, I’m featuring how to make Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  These might be my all-time favorite candy.  I can eat 10 of the miniature ones in one sitting!  And when they came out with the big caramel version, it was all over.  I used to buy a king-sized pack every day as an afternoon snack (this might be why I had to buy a new pair of jeans!).  Peanut butter cups also make me think  of my twin sister.  She loves them so much, her husband calls her “Reesy”!

Ingredients:

I bag of dark cocoa Candy Melts (light chocolate works, too, but I like the combination of dark chocolate and peanut butter)

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup  peanut butter (I like the smooth kind, but you can use crunchy, too)

1 cup confectioners sugar

2/3 cup graham crackers or graham cracker crumbs (surprise, surprise- that’s the secret ingredient that make the insides a little crunchy!)

Directions:

1.  If you don’t have graham cracker crumbs, you can mash up graham crackers in a ziploc bag with a meat tenderizer:

2. Combine butter and peanut butter in a sauce pan and cook over medium heat until melted (4-6 minutes), stir occasionally.  Once melted, add confectioner’s sugar and graham cracker crumbs. Remove from heat and let cool.  Stir the mixture together, it will come together and look like and have the consistency like play dough.

3.  Roll the peanut butter mixture in 1/2″- 3/4″ balls using your hands. It may be crumbly at first but once it warms up in your hands, it’ll start coming together:

4.  Microwave candy melts in 30 second intervals until melted, stirring in between.  You can use real chocolate combined with shortening, too, but I find candy melts the easiest to work with and they harden pretty quickly.   Spoon enough melted chocolate to fill the bottom half of a peanut butter cup molding tray. (The cups are about 1.5″ in diameter. I got mine at Michael’s for $1.99):

5. Gently drop a peanut butter ball into the center of the chocolate cups and “smush” around a little to cover the sides of the cup and the sides of the ball with chocolate. Don’t push the peanut butter cup all the way down to the bottom though:

6. Spoon a little more of the chocolate on top of the peanut butter ball, enough to cover the top:

7.  Gently tap the mold a few times and the chocolate will settle and cover the tops of the peanut butter balls. This will also help get rid of any air bubbles:

8.   Let cool and harden.  In about 25 minutes, the chocolate should be hard enough to pop out of the mold.  I placed them in paper truffle liner cups and stored in an air tight container:

Bring to work and your coworkers will love you forever!!

Yum!!!

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tagged as: peanut butter cups, recipe, reeses, unwrapped