Sunday, December 12, 2010

We Need A Little Christmas: Baking!

In the spirit of the season, I decided to make some homemade peanut butter cups. I had some ambitious plans about making some for everyone I knew, but you know how best laid plans go... I had read some about chocolate and melting chocolate and how you shouldn't use chocolate chips, so I started out with a big bar of chocolate from Trader Joe's (the pound and a half one). Unfortunately, I needed way more than said chocolate bar and didn't have a chance to go back to Trader Joe's and decided that I would go ahead and follow the recipe and make the remaining peanut butter cups with hersey bars and chocolate chips. Bad idea. The batch made with this method ended up grainy and didn't taste right. So sadly, I only ended up with a small amount of peanut butter cups that are good enough to give out. What are you going to do? So, lesson learned, go with your first instinct. I started with this recipe, but would recommend using an equivalent of a good chocolate bar, instead of using chocolate chips. Word on the street is that the wax in the chocolate chips does not lend to good melting. (Upon reading more about melting chocolate, turns out that the grainy chocolate outcome may have been caused by water! Apparently the littlest bit of water in chocolate causes it to seize up. I was working by the sink in my mini kitchen, so I guess it's possible. Just a word of caution if you happend to attempt to make these.)

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