Peanut Butter and Jam Cupcakes

The world has seen many classic couples; Romeo and Juliet, fish and chips, Ben and Jerry, chocolate and chocolate.  This week I decided to explore one such dynamic duo, specifically, one inspired by the culinary geniuses of America: peanut butter and jam.  Such perfect flavouring deserves a perfect medium through which to express its greatness, and what better than the small but mighty cupcake?  

I used the peanut butter cupcake recipe in my tasty new book, Love Food: The Cupcake.  This was supposed to yield sixteen lovely, golden, peanutty cupcakes, but I ended up with fifteen.  I suppose mine were extra large lovely, golden, peanutty cupcakes.  They were extra large, anyway.  Once they had cooled down, I cut a small cone-shaped chunk out of the top and filled the space with as much strawberry preserve as I could jam in before replacing the wedge of cake.

 For the icing, I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s vanilla icing, with two heaped teaspoons of strawberry jam mixed in with a spoon at the end.  As I am currently without a pallet knife (they are on my birthday wish list, the first time any cooking accessory has featured) I piled this on with a spoon and smoothed it out, leaving it a little rough.  I would like to pretend that this was because it looks nice with the big brown peanuts, but it was actually because spoons are not as effective at smoothing out icing as pallet knifes.  I filled a bowl with peanuts and dipped the top of the cakes in them, leaving them with an unhealthily healthy topping.

The famous flavour team did not fail.  The cupcakes tasted very strongly of peanuts, so they are a miss if you don’t really like them that much – but then, if you do not like peanuts very much, you probably will not choose to make these.  The jam in the middle was, I am told, a tasty surprise; the sweetness worked well with the peanuts, and the jam-flavoured icing was sweet without being overpowering.

This delicious double act has joined forces with the humble cupcake to form a tasty new take on an old favourite.  It seems that while some good things result from a perfect pairing, really good things undeniably come in threes.