Page 118 Peanut Butter-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

"An abundance of creamy peanut-butter filling renders these cupcakes extra-rich and irresistible. The batter and filling -- each whisked together by hand -- are layered, then swirled to create the marbelized pattern on top." - Martha

Holy cow! These were too much trouble too make! You needed two bowls, one for the chocolate batter and one for the peanut butter batter, a pan for simmering water and a pan for heating the butters and chocolate together, and then if you desire, a bowl into which you'd sift your flour mixture. After I began these cupcakes, I realized the mess was beginning. But I did everything right (sort of, we'll get to that later) and the batters both tasted pretty good, but OMG! These are horrible! I couldn't eat a whole one! I didn't mind the chocolate part so much, it tasted like a brownie...kind of. But the peanut butter filling/swirl was ransid tasting. Perhaps my peanut butter was ransid, but you couldn't tell by the taste of it plain nor when it was in the batter. Maybe, as it cooked, the terrible taste was accentuated, I don'tknow, but I had to throw them all out. (Except, before I got a chance to taste them, I gave some to my neighbor...I hope I didn't make anyone sick in their house.)

So my substitutions were as follows: I only had a 1/4 cup of smooth peanut butter in the pantry so I used that PLUS another peanut butter called PB2 which is a dry powder peanut butter that you add water to make it moist again. This is a fat free product. Also, I didn't have any unsweetened chocolate squares so I used the standard substitution of 3T of dutch cocoa powder with 1 T of shortening to make 1 oz. of unsweetened chocolate. I needed 2 ounces of it. Otherwise everything was great, and like I said, the batter was good, just not the finished product.