Chocolate and Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

It has not been too long since I have last posted about cupcakes. Yet it is time again for more. This week it is both S's and L's birthday. Yes both of them in one week. To make it even crazier they are having their birthday party on the same night. Thankfully my sister is helping out with one. S decided to have a slumber party! Not sure how many guests will actually sleep over. My hope is that S actually sleeps. She has cycled into the not sleeping zone. Not my favorite time.

L decided she wanted to see the new Lego movie for her birthday. Right now I am planning on taking four crazy eight/nine year old girls and one boy - her cousin. Thankfully I will have no problem not watching the movie.

L has been psyching herself up for her birthday for weeks. The closer she gets the more she bounces around. The anxiety of birthday parties almost makes me wish they were never invented. Luckily the memories mostly contains the good parts - and I do try for the good parts. So when L made her list of cakes - yep plural - I did my best to accommodate.

She wanted vanilla, chocolate, chocolate peanut butter, and peanut butter.

The first thing I did was narrow her down from cakes to cupcakes - that was easy. She was insistent on the flavors. It was not in a bad way, and it is nice to see her positive about food.

I decided to adapt the cupcake recipe that I made for J's birthday. We already knew we liked that. I four times the batch (two birthdays!) and made one muffin pan of vanilla cupcakes. In a few of the cupcakes I filled the muffin cup up half way, threw in some peanut butter, and then covered it with more mix. This will work with almond butter or blended fruit.

When I moved on to the second pan I threw in two heaping spoonfuls of cocoa powder (this would be one for the typical recipe size). This turned vanilla cupcakes into chocolate cupcakes. I then filled some of these cupcakes up with peanut butter. L plans on frosting some of the cupcakes with peanut butter and some with chocolate. I frosted one for her birthday lunch and it looks like frosting which is awesome.

The one thing to note about this recipe is that it only makes six cupcakes. So with four x it we ended up with 24 cupcakes.

**Peanut butter is not considered Paleo. I totally realize this. While I have decided not to eat peanut butter and only use almond butter, I have not done this for my children. One almond butter is expensive and my kids can put down an entire bottle in a day. Two L WILL NOT eat almond butter unless I cook with it (she only eats the organic peanut butter from Ralph's with palm sugar with the wrapping she is used to). Three I have found no good reason for not eating Peanuts except that they are not quite as nutritious for you - so we use it as an extra food after they eat all the good healthy stuff.**