Peanut Butter Cups (Cakes) in a Jar

Happy Weekend! 

Can you believe it?! I'm going to post about baking. 

A first for this blog, I believe.

After being inspired by this lady and seeing the buzz all over the internet, I've decided to jump on the band wagon and make cakes in a jar!

We're having some friends over for the 4th and I thought what's more patriotic than peanut butter cups?

Ok, maybe it's not that patriotic, but it's definitely a flavor combination Americans love.

I'll just show you the general process, but you can get the detailed recipe here.

Of course, I had to make a recipe that calls for equipment that I didn't already have. At this point, I'm trying to only buy food, so that I won't have more things to pack, but I just couldn't resist this one time... 

I bought Kerr half pint jars. I liked the smaller portion this size provides and the straight sides made it very easy to layer the ingredients.

Before the fun could begin, the jars needed to be washed!

I used Duncan Hines Devil's Food Cake mix. I hardly ever use a cake mix, but since I'm trying to get rid of as many pantry items as possible, I thought I'd make things easy. 

I did however, use organic eggs...

The recipe calls for 8 oz of peanut butter. Surprisingly, I haven't packed up our food scale yet. In fact, I'm still surprised that we even own one. Aleks bought it this year when he started baking bread. It's turning out to be a very useful purchase.

My peanut butter and sugar never really came together and looked like a bowl of small pebbles, instead of one large peanut buttery ball. I don't know if I needed more PB or what, but I made do. When I formed the mixture into balls, I just had to be careful not to squeeze too hard or else it would crumble.

1. Spoon batter into the bottom of the jars

2. Drop a ball of the PB mixture into the center of each jar

3. Spoon enough batter in each jar to cover the PB ball

Maia helped by dropping each ball into the cake batter. It was going really well until she started taking the balls out of the batter.

Here they are just out of the oven.

Add chocolate to the hot cakes.

Cover jars with the lids and swirl to coat tops with the melted chocolate. I don't know how well the swirling worked. I'll be able to see once they've been opened.

The thing I love about this, is that they can then be put into the refrigerator for up to a week! It's the perfect do-ahead dessert.