These Monster Peanut Butter Cup Stuffed Cupcakes are a fun treat for Halloween- your kids will love the delicious surprise inside!
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I've heard that second children are generally the wild ones. While I know this is a sweeping generalization, it certainly applies for my girls. Now I'm a firm believer there there really are no black and whites in life- just a ton of gray areas. Now there are varying levels of gray areas but I really don't think things are that cut and dry.
So while A can totally have her wild moments, T definitely fills that Wild Woman role in our family. There are some many things that never even came up with A that are now realities with T.
Recently, T has been full-on removing her diaper. It's often around bed time. Sometimes we'll let her hang in her diaper while we're watching Mickey and getting ready for bed, if not for any other reason, but to give her a break from clothes. She always seems to enjoy this time and has a blast playing on the bed and crawling/rolling/jumping around.
But her daredevil side is off the chats (at least, by our standards- I'm used to A taking calculated risks, but generally being pretty cautious). T will straight up inch her way off the bed, head first until she's hanging there about to come crashing down head first. She loves to climb up on things like chairs and her rocking horse and always makes a point to stand up and shoot me a mischievous grin. It's like she knows exactly what she;s doing and she always seems to relish in it.
While it's slightly terrifying at times, it's also super fun to see her personality come through. In some ways she's so similar to her sister, but in many ways she's so different. I like to think we got the best of both worlds in terms of our gals' personalities.
Sometimes I totally fail at creating holiday-themed recipes. Kind of the same way I fail at decorating for the holidays. We currently do not have a speck of Halloween decor in our home, save for a few Halloween-themed sticky gel window clings that I picked up for a dollar at a grocery store after A got her flu shot. But I don't really consider those decorations as much as they are cheap entertainment and somewhat of an eyesore. That being said, I never did take down our Santa's Village from last year, so maybe I'm just really ahead of the game in that regard- HA!
While I would love to be that mom who is super on top of seasonal things and celebrating holiday stuff, I'm far too much of a hot mess for that (as any of my long-time readers/Instagram story followers know!). But when I decided to do a cupcake recipe for #Choctoberfest2017 (don't forget to enter the giveaway here and check out the other amazing recipes below!) I made a promise to myself that it would be Halloween themed.
You can totally make these cupcakes at any time of the year and to fit whatever theme you're working with. Monsters sounded like a fun option, mostly because A loves monsters (we've built them up to be fun and friendly, not scary- fingers crossed that she views them that way for a while!). Now because I wanted to get some serious height on the frosting, I actually used somewhere between 2-3 containers of frosting and an insane amount of green food coloring (something like 50 drops per container- I know, I'm insane.).
A little excessive, right? But it was all in good fun and you can easily cut down the amounts that you use or alter the color to your liking. To create the look of a monster I used large and small candy eyeballs (which are soooooo much fun and I pretty much want to put them on every food item that I make!!).
I used my favorite cake mix hack for this recipes because it's hard to beat this insanely simple recipe when it yields the most moist and perfect cake. My stuffing of choice was Reese's Mini Peanut Butter Cups, but you can really put in any candy of your choosing. I think the middle what a nice surprise, and judging by the look on A's face (wide eyes and a delighted smile) I think she agreed wholeheartedly!
Check out these other fantastic #Choctoberfest2017 recipes:
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Here are some of my other favorite Chocolate recipes:
- Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread
- Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bites
- Four Ingredient Chocolate Mousse
- Quick and Easy Chocolate Pudding Cake
- Chocolate Crinkles
- Salted Cranberry and Pistachio Bark
- Orange Cake with Chocolate Ganache Glaze
- Peppermint Ice Cream Pie
- Gluten-Free Peanut Butter Bars
- Chocolate Cherry Oatmeal Cookie Bars
- PB&J Brownies
- Chocolate Peppermint Crinkles
- German Cream Cheese Brownies
- M&M’S® Brownie Truffles
- S’mores Bars
- Black Forest Ice Cream Pie
- PMS Bark
- Peanut Butter Brownie Truffles
Monster Peanut Butter Cup Stuffed Cupcakes
Ingredients
- 1 box of chocolate cake mix I like Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake or Dark Chocolate Fudge Cake
- 2 small boxes of instant chocolate pudding
- 1 cup of warm water
- ¾ of a cup of vegetable or canola oil
- 5 extra-large eggs you can also use large if that's what you have
- Around 20-24 Reese's Mini Peanut Butter Cups
- 2-3 containers of vanilla frosting
- Green food coloring
- Candy eye balls
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and line your pan with cupcake liners.
- Mix the first 5 ingredients until just combined.
- Spoon batter ¼ of the way into the cups.
- Place a peanut butter cup into the cup.
- Cover it with batter (it should be most of the way full at this point).
- Bake for 17-20 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.
- Mix food coloring into the frosting until it reaches the desired shade of green.
- Pipe the frosting onto the cupcakes (I went for height but you can always use less if you don't want them to be as tall).
- Randomly place the candy eyeballs all over the frosting to resemble a monster.
- Refrigerate until ready to serve to set the frosting.
- Enjoy!
Notes
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