Chocolate Peanut Buttery Goodness

If you love chocolate and you love peanut butter, this just may be the perfect cupcake combination for you.

I accidentally stumbled on this recipe while viewing this food blog a few months ago

I stared at the recipe for weeks. I've never baked anything with this many steps, so I was definitely intimidated! I thought I had the chocolate cake recipe pretty down pat, but the steps involving dropping the beanut butter fillings on a dollop of cake batter, then filling the top half of the cupake with more cake batter I found quite daunting. And then the frosting, that was even more duanting, I have NEVER had a terribly successful (and by that I mean yummy) frosting come from scratch. So I bookmarked the recipe and decided to put it off...

... until a pregnant friend of mine invited a few of us over to her place for dinner. This was the excuse I was looking for, not just a party, but for a pregnant friend. Now I could indulge.... err, I mean, help my fellow sister in Islam fullfill a pregnancy craving. :p

They turned out delicious. In fact, I've made them 2 more times since. This is officially my favourite cupcake, hands down. I'm not a huge cream cheese fan but I liked the frosting. Mainly because it too was peanut butter flavoured.

* I made 2 batches the first time. If you look in the comments section of the blog post, you'll see that many posters mentinoed their peanut butter balls exploded inside the cupcake. Mine did too the first time. I made the second batch but froze the peanut butter balls for 15 minutes and they held up well and were perfectly in place after baking. Taste wise - they were equally delicious both times, I just wanted to get it right for OCD reasons and aesthetic reasons. ;)

* If you want your cupcakes to look pretty and professional, you can buy a starter kit at Walmart complete with a few cupcake decorating tips and piping bags. This is the one I own. I used the smaller of the two star tips.

* I refrigerated the frosting for about an hour so that it would pipe well and not get messy.

* I don't have any pictures of the inside, because... well... by the time I pulled out my camera to snap some pics, I had already eaten too many. No way was I going to bite into another so I could take a picture!

Enjoy! If you have any questions, or if I'm forgetting to mention something, ask away! =)

Resurrecting Qabeelat Hayl - Fall '06

Hayl al Awwal, Hayl At-Thaani. No, I'm not talking about the Islamic months. I'm talking about the student body of AlMaghrib institute in the 'cow-tipping' town of Columbus.

Hayl was born in 2004. Hayls' first Almaghrib class was in the spring of 2005, The Code Evolved, taught by Sheikh Yaser Birjas. However, by the beginning of 2006, we were shut down. We didn't meet the required number of students.

The qabeelah on wheels was born. Ann Arbor, Maryland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago. If we had walked, we'd probably be following in Baqiyy's footsteps.

After being bashed mercilessly by Ustadh Muhammad Alshareef in Chicago, we, the sensitive and 'emotional' sisters, took it personally and decided to do something about it. Of course when our emotions left us, we realized the wisdom behind the bashing.

The action plan was born. The promos began. There was buzzing all around, and we were gettin' down to business! I was by then in my first going into the second trimester (did I tell you that my baking frenzy always strike during my pregnancies?). The Haylsters (that's Hayl sisters) were busy preparing for the Promo down at Columbus State. Since I was partially incapacitated by pregnancy, they didn't let me do much, but they didn't know how stubborn I can be.

I told them I had a surprise, inshaallah. It was to be my first ever mass cuppies, all 200 of them. AlMaghrib junood I call 'em: standing proudly with their Almaghrib purple armor, bearing their liwaa flags with the word 'AlMaghrib'.

Those flags by the way, were hastily handwritten, with much love, I might add, by a pregnant woman whose common sense had belied her. She could have asked her husband to print out the AlMaghrib logo, all 200 of them, for the cuppies, but instead, she ordered her children to help her do it the hard way.

She measured the sizes of those little flags. She scrutinized the AlMaghrib logo to figure out the font, and she tried writing it out on paper. It was not easy. She tried again. That sun was one heaven of a thingamajig to draw! But she tried again. After many tries, she got it.

She took a deep breath, sat down, gathered all the colored papers on which she had precisely measured and gridded, and set to work. She wrote, drew, and wrote and drew, until her husband turned to look at her, tsk, tsked, and remarked,

"You're out of your mind."

200 of them. She was going to make 200 of those little flags, by hand, and time was running out. But he knew enough to leave her alone. She can be crazy when it comes to one of her creative strikes. Before long, she has mastered the font and logo, that she could probably do it in her sleep. Yet, she fell short of 200, but she made do. Each flag, she traced with highlighters, pink and blue, mostly, to cover the flaws in her handwritten logos.

On D day, the cuppies were ready, all gussied up, bearing their homemade flags. Worried they might slide and bump into each other in their expansive cuppy boxes, she had her children pipe dots of royal icing on the bottom of each cuppy and stick them in their place in the boxes. Of course, the boxes were lined with aluminum foil, so it'd look nice (also rendering the boxes reusable).

Logictics problem: her fridge wasn't big enough to hold two huge boxes of AlMaghrib junood cuppies.

Solution: the van. The temperature outside was in the forties, perfect fridge temperature. Her husband helped her put those cuppies in the van, and in the van they remained until the time of the promo.

The ride to Columbus State (the site of the promo) was excruciating. Every bump, turn, and stop was unbearable, and no, she was not in labor. Her little cuppies, her little babies, all 200 of them had to stay intact. They just had to! Alhamdulillah, they did. Those little AlMaghrib junood behaved very well, remained in their respective places, and lowered her heartbeat and blood pressure upon frantic checking on arrival.


These cuppies were baked, decorated, and flagged by a pregnant woman who was crazy enough to attempt making 200 (and more) decorated cupcakes, thinking at the back of her mind,

Let's see if I can pull this off. If I can, it would help when I make a decision to open a cupcake business in Malaysia.

And the flags were actually a last minute idea (the reason why she couldn't have them printed, which turned out for the best anyway), since she couldn't find anything at the Cake Craft store to represent AlMaghrib. So they had to be customized.

That, my friends, is the story of the Almaghrib cuppies, lovingly baked, decorated, and agonized over by an AlMaghriber, an auntie Haylster who is about to leave her beloved Haylsters for she doesn't know where soon.

And no, I haven't attempted making anymore cuppies since then. I'm waiting for some Obama ones.

Got Hayl?