Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

At the beginning of the summer I decided that my new hobby (how many new hobbies does one person need? apparently I need a lot!) was going to be baking. Or, more specifically, baking and decorating. I like baking (and I definitely like eating), but I also wanted to start to bake new things and practice decorating them. The problem with this new hobby is that I can bake all I want, but what do I do with all these bake goods once I'm done. I certainly can't sit around and eat an entire cake by myself, or an entire batch of cupcakes! So, my hobby got put on hold because I didn't have anyone to bake for. I did plenty of research though. I got a lot of recipes to try and decorating books etc., I just never made anything. I kept telling myself that when I go back to school it will be great because I can bake as much as I want, eat a little, then take the rest to school, so I was getting prepared.

But, I digress. I woke up this morning and wanted to bake today, so I did. This turned into quite an expensive ordeal seeing as how I decided I needed a new muffin pan, a cupcake carrier to hold my cupcakes in, piping bags, and piping tips (plus all the ingredients of course haha). So I ended up spending my morning running around collecting the things I needed.

I came home this afternoon and whipped up some chocolate cupcake batter from scratch:

who doesn't like chocolate?!?

Of course I had to taste it to make sure it was good:

it was! yum!! :)

Then I found a great recipe for a peanut butter icing made with cream cheese. I love it because it's really light in texture, but it's super rich in taste! It's not an overpowering peanut butter flavor, it's just enough mixed with the rich cream cheese to give the cupcake a little excitement. Before I iced the cupcakes I got out my piping bag. I had way more icing than necessary so I decided to test out my piping skills and made some stars.

That was easy! I see how this could be very very fun!

Then I got serious and started to pipe the icing on my cupcakes. Of course this would be about the time I had to merge my two new hobbies and take about 50 pictures of the cupcakes. Seriously, I took a TON of pictures!

Aren't they pretty? I think they turned out beautifully!

Now, if I must be honest, the cake is a little dry, but I attribute that to the fact that this was the first time I've baked in my oven (sad, I know!) and it cooks quicker than I was expecting. Now I know for the future that I need to take things out a few minutes before the time is up. However, they are still yummy :)