Diet? What diet?

I was reading through some random blogs and found a recipe for chocolate peanut butter cups. It was a Nigella recipe too! My boss had recently gone a trip to America and had brought back some Reese's peanut butter cups (and Hershey's Kisses and lots of other American sweeties) and I loved them. Since I haven't found the official ones here (although I haven't looked that hard) I thought I might try and make them.

Chocolate-peanut-butter-cups
Nigella Lawson, Feast, courtesy of BBC Food

Ingredients

For the base
50g/2oz soft dark brown sugar
200g/7oz icing sugar
50g/2oz butter, softened
200g/7oz smooth peanut butter (not wholenut)
For the topping
200g/7oz milk chocolate
100g/3½oz dark chocolate
gold buttons and edible gold stars to decorate, or other decorations of your choice

Method

1. For the base, place all the ingredients for the base in the bowl of a food processor. Blend the mixture until the mixture takes on a sandy texture.
2. Place 48 gold petit four cases in sets of miniature tart tins or mini-muffin tins (each indent about 4.5cm/1¾in in diameter).
3. Use one teaspoon of the base mixture to fill the bases of the petit four cases. Press the sandy mixture down into the cases as best you can to form a layer at the bottom of each paper case.
4. Place the milk chocolate and dark chocolate together into a heatproof bowl. Suspend the bowl over a pan of simmering water (the water should not touch the bottom of the bowl). Melt the chocolate gently while stirring.
5. Spoon teaspoonfuls of the melted chocolate onto the top of each of the sandy bases of the petit four cases.
6. Decorate the tops of the chocolate covered peanut butter cups with either a gold button or gold star in the middle of each and transfer them to the fridge. Let them set in the fridge, for about half an hour.
7. To serve, arrange the chocolate peanut butter cups in their cases on a clean plate.

They are decadently yummy. I think I ruined it for myself though by buying low fat peanut butter, because the bases didn't hold together. They stayed pretty sandy. I don't care, I'm eating them, even though they are terrible messy and you can't just brush any crumbs away because you'll end up with big peanut butter smear (or that could just be because I'm a bit clumsy when it comes to these things)


I halved the recipe too, thinking that 48 would be way too much of a chocolate indulgence, but even the halved recipe made heaps. I made 43. However, halving the chocolate topping didn't give me enough to drizzle, unless I was drizzling to thickly (I don't care if I was! They are good!). I ended up making the topping according to the recipe and not halving it at all.

Next time I'll try either full fat peanut butter or adding more butter. I'm tossing up whether the do the chocolate topping too, because I really only like it because of the sweet peanut-y taste, the chocolate is just there. I think some little peanut butter/sugar squares would taste pretty good too.