Recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake Cupcakes

A mouthful of a recipe name, yes,  but a mouthful of gooey goodness, too! I saw this recipe in the free Kraft Kitchen's magazine - Get Cooking. It gets mailed to me every so often and the picture was so appetizing that I simply had to whip up a batch. Plus, we were having dinner with friends and I couldn't just show up empty handed!

The picture on the website is a bit more attractive than mine (I opted to skip the whipped cream and cheery for a more rustic cupcake), but tasted, I'm sure, just as good. The basic brownie batter is then filled with a dollop of cream cheese mixed with peanut butter and sugar and then baked in the oven. The result, a rich and creamy bite of chocolate and peanut butter - two of my favourite things!

Here is the original recipe from the site:

INGREDIENTS

1 pkg. (450 g) brownie mix

175 g (3/4 of 250-g) Philadelphia Brick Cream Cheese, softened

1/4 cup Kraft Smooth Peanut Butter

2 Tbsp. Sugar

1 cup thawed Cool Whip Whipped Topping

12 Maraschino cherries

DIRECTIONS

HEAT oven to 350ºF. Prepare brownie batter as directed on package. Spoon into 12 paper-lined muffin cups.

BEAT cream cheese, peanut butter and sugar with mixer until blended. Spoon 1 rounded Tbsp. into center of batter in each cup, pressing down slightly into batter. Bake 25 min. or until centers are set. Cool.

SERVE topped with Cool Whip and cherries.

If you don't have the Brownie mix handy, you can make your own with some ease. Here are the ingredients I used for fudge brownies:

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup butter or margarine

2 ounces unsweetened chocolate

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

DIRECTIONS

IN a medium saucepan, melt butter and chocolate over low heat. Remove from heat when combined. 

STIR in eggs, sugar, and vanilla and beat lightly with a wooden spoon.

STIR in flour and pour into lined muffin cups.  

And then you just carry on the rest of the steps from the original recipe, above.

Now don't get this recipe confused with the other Peanut Butter Cheesecakes I've blogged about. Those are actual mini cheesecakes with a Reese's cup in the center. These are more of a brownie with peanut butter cream cheese in the middle. Both are equally good, though...