Chocolate Cupcakes filled with Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and topped with Peanut Butter Frosting! Yum!

Last night, we all decided this is about the most amazing cupcake recipe ever!! I say "about" because we eat a lot of dessert at our house. It's truly gonna be difficult to ever declare something the "BEST EVER".

I had some peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough in the freezer that someone had given me. So, that is where I started. I will not pretend to post a recipe for Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookie dough that is the same as what I used last night. I'll just say that ANY cookie dough is good! Even that refrigerated rolled up stuff. And, get creative with it! I had fun with the peanut butter theme.

**Before you can do anything else, though, you need to make 24 tablespoon sized balls of cookie dough and freeze them for a couple of hours.

Besides that, for the cupcakes you will need:
1 cake mix (I used chocolate)
1/2 cup oil
1 1/3 cup water
3 eggs
Make according to box directions. In fact, if the box says 2 eggs and 2 cups of water, then go ahead and follow the box directions. There is certainly nothing magical about what I added to my cake mix!

Divide the batter into 24 paper lined cupcake tins. Place one frozen cookie dough ball in the middle of each tin. I pressed them in just a little, but it really wasn't necessary! The cupcake will "grow" around the cookie dough!

Bake this incredible yumminess at 350 for about 20 minutes. This pic is in the oven... Cool completely before frosting.
Since the dough was peanut butter based, I decided to make a Peanut Butter Frosting - which by the way was a great idea!!

Peanut Butter Frosting
1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup butter
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup cream or milk
First, cream the peanut butter and butter til smooth. Add about half of the powdered sugar and cream, then mix until smooth. Finish with the remaining amounts. You may have to adjust and add a little more milk or powdered sugar until it is the consistency you like....and soft enough to be spreadable.

I like piping the frosting on, because it looks like it came from a bakery! Obviously my decorating skills aren't all that fantastic, but I think these look much better than cupcakes that have frosting spread to the edges with a butter knife! This one is cut in half, so maybe it isn't as pretty now, but I wanted you to see the cookie dough in the middle! Yum!

Enjoy!!

Triple Layer Chocolate Chip Bars with Peanut Butter Filling

Sisters' Gourmet is in full swing this time of the year, getting our cookie mixes produced and shipped out for fall baking. With production comes the "reject table"! You may think of this as a bad thing, but it's really not. Pam, our Quality Control Manager, is very good at what she does! Among many other things she is watching for, she makes sure our layered cookie mixes always LOOK good in the jar. If the layers are in disarray, or it otherwise just doesn't look nice, she rejects the jar. Hence the reject table.

Each of us takes home cookies from the reject table to bake for friends, neighbors, family (of course), and we give some away to anyone else who deserves cookies that day (i.e. truck drivers, vendors, etc.). Now, don't take this wrong, but sometimes I get tired of baking the same cookies. It's not that I won't EAT the same cookie day after day, but I like to be creative when I'm baking them.

Long story short.....I'm going to be exploring other recipes that use basic chocolate chip cookie dough, since that's what is on the reject table this week. Today's recipe uses about 3 cups of prepared chocolate cookie dough, but it can easily be adjusted to use more or less. I will just list the cookie dough as an ingredient. Of course, you can substitute your favorite recipe, some refrigerated dough, or mix up a Sisters' Gourmet cookie mix!

Super easy.......You will need:
about 3 cups of chocolate chip cookie dough
1 1/2 cups peanut butter
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

Prepare a 9x9 baking pan with vegetable oil spray. Preheat oven to 350. Spread about 1/2 of the cookie dough in the bottom of the prepared pan. Mix the remaining ingredients (will be thick) and spread over the cookie dough. Now, crumble (or spread, depending on the consistency of your dough) the other 1/2 of dough over the peanut butter mixture. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until golden on top. Cool completely before cutting unless you enjoy a peanut butter and chocolately mess!

I've got a crowd over tonight, and everyone is loving these bars! The best way to describe them is that they are something like a peanut butter bon bon surrounded by chocolate chip cookie. Enjoy!!