The Prettiest Peanut Butter Cupcakes
I am so excited to be sharing these peanut butter cupcakes with you today! This carefully-tested recipe was meticulously designed to yield light and fluffy, flavorful and moist cupcakes that absolutely melt in your mouth. They’re topped with a beautiful (but easy!) swirl of chocolate peanut butter frosting that complements the cake perfectly. If you’re a chocolate & peanut butter fan, you’re just going to love these. With its rich, creamy texture, you may be surprised to find out that peanut butter is actually very drying and can be quite difficult to bake with. As a result, perfecting this recipe was quite a challenge, especially since peanut butter can make things more dense as well, and I wanted these to be light and fluffy (even lighter than my peanut butter chocolate chip muffins). Lots of tweaking and testing happened before this one was ready to share, but we finally nailed it!
Why you should try my recipe:
Super moist, thanks to a few carefully selected ingredients.Makes 24 cupcakes–great for parties!Impressive two-tone frosting swirl (that’s actually super easy to do!).Easy: no creaming butter, sifting flour, or whipping eggs.
What You Need
Don’t be overwhelmed by everything up there–these peanut butter cupcakes are very easy to make. Just make sure to pay close attention to the following ingredients:
Peanut butter. Use “regular” creamy peanut butter and not the natural kind that separates. If you like the crunch, you could use crunchy peanut butter in the cupcakes themselves, but I don’t recommend it for the frosting.Cake flour. Using cake flour helps us achieve a light and fluffy texture while still incorporating peanut butter in the batter. All-purpose flour could yield a more dense result, which I actively wanted to avoid.Sour cream. Sour cream adds flavor and moisture (a note taken from my yellow cake). Full-fat greek yogurt will also work! Milk. Milk helps lighten the cupcakes and keeps them from being too dense. I prefer to bake with whole milk and recommend it here for best results.Cocoa powder. I like using natural cocoa powder here, but you could use Dutch process cocoa powder instead. The flavor will be more intense if you do.
SAM’S TIP: The swirled frosting may look complicated, but the preparation is actually very simple. It’s also irresistibly tasty (reminds me of peanut butter buckeyes). Note: This recipe makes a fair bit of frosting so you have enough to make nice swirls on each cupcake. Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Peanut Butter Cupcakes
SAM’S TIP: Your cupcakes are done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or (preferably) with a few moist crumbs. The cracks on top of the cupcakes might still look underdone at this point, but if your toothpick shows the cupcakes are ready, take them out. If you leave them in too long, your cupcakes will be dry and crumbly. You can use this swirled frosting technique with most of my other frostings too (as long as they are of a similar thickness). Vanilla frosting and strawberry frosting would be so pretty together! Enjoy! Let’s bake together! I’ll be walking you through all the steps in my written recipe and video below! If you try this recipe, be sure to tag me on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube and Facebook
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