Baking in Sessions, Chocolate, Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Filling and Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting

Because my baking and cooking sessions have been limited, and sporadic, these cupcakes were made over a period of two weeks.  I'll explain.  I had adapted and  made the Devils Food  cupcake recipe from Chockylit's Cup Cake blog, several weeks ago for my friend"s birthday party. I added 3/4 c. mini-chocolate chip morsels to the batter I only wanted 12 cupcakes, so I froze the rest of the batter., which I had never done before. Then I read how freezing the batter is not a good idea.have any of you ever frozen cake batter. Well, if the cupcakes didn't turn out, I would just make new batter.

I cautiously defrosted the batter in the fridge three days before I needed to take these to a birthday celebration for my son and his girlfriend. Once the batter was defrosted, I took the batter out of the fridge and beat the batter for about 2 min. on high to "renew" the batter.  I had read that the cupcakes fall in the in the  middle if the batter had been frozen.  I carefully filled the cupcake liners with the beaten batter, and put them in the oven.  About 5 min. in the oven, I turned on the oven light to check.  I wanted to see if they were rising, and they were.  Five more minutes went by and I had to check again, and they were even higher! When I took them out of the oven, most had nice round tops. At least for this batter, freezing it wasn't detrimental to the results.  Maybe the secret step was beating the batter, before filling the cupcake liners and baking them. These beauties were going on the rack to cool and be filled the next day.

For the filling  I was going to make a regular peanut butter filling, but decided just to fill them with the natural peanut butter that we eat, Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter.  The only ingredients are peanuts and salt .I filled them with the cone method and put them back in the fridge to be frosted later in the day.

So later in the day, I frosted the cupcakes with Chocolate  Butter Cream frosting from Chockylit, and garnished the cup cakes with halves of  peanut butter cups.  In a three day span I finally finished the cupcakes, which were delicious.  Sometimes you just have to to do, what you can do and roll with it.  Soon, I will be posting the Apple Crisp that I made for my son.