Crazy Cupcake Duo

I haven't been doing much baking lately, probably because it's so hot I hate turning on the oven and making it hotter than hot. But, since it was my awesome friend Randi's bday this weekend I decided to pull out all the stops and try two new cupcakes. The first was a Chocolate peanut butter concoction with a Resse's cup at the bottom. I plopped the Reese's cup in the foil liner, poured in the chocolate cupcake batter and baked as usual. It was topped with delicious peanut butter buttercream icing and some cocoa for show (I'm being inspired by Cupcake Wars to get a little fancier with the presentation haha). The second cupcake was a chocolate cake with caramel injected after baking and topped with a cream cheese, chocolate espresso icing and finished with espresso sugar crystals. Here are some pics of the duo:



The overall consensus was that the peanut butter ones were awesome and the other ones were pretty good, but most preferred the peanut butter. I don't really have recipes for either one since I just made them up but the cakes were from Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Cake recipe. The Peanut Butter Buttercream was made with about 1/2c peanut butter and a stick of butter and 1/4c of shortening. Then powdered sugar to whatever consistency you like. The Espresso icing was 1 brick of cream cheese, 1/2 stick of butter, 1t espresso ground, and 1/3c of cocoa. Once again, add powdered sugar to desired consistency. I used my Pampered Chef Icing gun to inject the caramel (I couldn't find dulche de leche so I just used caramel ice cream topping).