Peanut Butter and Jelly Up-side-down cupcakes!!!

This latest baking adventure began when I cleaned out my Grandma's fridge. I guess it's my Grandpa's fridge too, but he doesn't really use it. Sure, it holds food that he eats, but of the meals my Grandpa eats at home, my Nana makes 90% of them. The others involve Grandpa either pouring his own shredded wheat, or assembling his own turkey sand which.

So, back to the story. When I cleaned out my Grandma's fridge, I found five jars of peanut butter and 6 jars of jelly. Wow. For two people that I have never in my life, or in the nearly year I have been living with them, eat peanut butter and/or jelly, that's a lot of PB&J. Turns out, Grandpa baits his humane traps for backyard critters with peanut butter. Still not sure how we ended up with that much jelly. But all the better for me!

I decided to make peanut butter and jelly cupcakes. They sounded delicious, and I got to use up some peanut butter and jelly. Now, I successfully emptied 4 mostly empty jelly jars (Smuckers Strawberry Preserves, Smuckers Simply Fruit Strawberry, and some yummy Pomegranate jelly, and some freezer preserves strawberry jelly from a restaurant my parents got them). Unfortunately, there is a lot of peanut butter in one jar. I think between this recipe and the other peanut butter recipe I whipped up, I used almost one jar. But that's ok, because its spring, and those moles and chipmunks will need trappin' again soon!

Now, I was a little nervous when I whipped up this batter. Sure, it was delicious, and a perfect cupcake batter consistency. But, I was concerned it wouldn't hold up the jelly.

Sure enough, when I pulled them out of the oven, they were oozing. When I pulled them out, they all had craters in the bottom! The jelly had sun though!
They look like flat topped jelly volcanoes. Now, I discussed this with my Grandma, and she said "well, they're kind of like pineapple upside-down cake." And thus, a name was born. Peanut Butter and Jelly Upside-down cupcakes. Its a mouthfull, but hot dang, these are delicious cupcakes. REALLY DELICIOUS. Like, hoard them in your basement freezer and take them out when you need a little bit of happy delicious.
Sadly, they also made messy dishes. Good thing I love my Pam.
See, they look so pretty from the top!
Peanut Butter and Jelly Upside-Down Cupcaks
Now, if you're going to make these, I would suggest maybe laying off the milk, or definitely reducing it, to make these more of a muffin consistency so they hold up the jelly. This is a cooks.com recipe, shame on them! Also, the recipe said not to use natural-style peanut butter, or the muffins (they tried pretending these were muffins. HA!) wouldn't rise.

• 1 cup flour
• 3/4 c. whole wheat flour
• 1/4 c. granulated sugar
• 1/4 c. packed brown sugar
• 1 tbs. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 1/4 c. skim milk
• 1/3 c. creamy peanut butter
• 1/4 cup egg substitute (I just used like one egg I think)
• 2 tbs. melted butter
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• PAM!!
• 1/4 c. strawberry jam

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Mix everything together (except jelly/jam) It says to stir just until moist. Yeah, the wet ingredients in this recipe make a really wet cupcakes consistency batter. I would mix everything except the milk, and then probably add milk slowly until you get a thick, sticky, muffin type batter.
3. Fill pre-greased muffin cups 1/2 full with the batter. Spoon 1 tsp. jam into each cup. Spoon remaining batter on top to cover jam. This recipe makes 12, but as you could see, mine were giant cupcakes. Next time, I'll make more than 12, so they're not so big.
4. Bake at 400 for 20 min or until muffins are light and springy. Cool for 5 min in pan, then cool completely on a wire rack.
   

What I like to bake

To prove that I don't spend all my time training for triathlons and eating granola and yogurt, I decided to post some photos of my historical baking exploits i.e. the only photos I have of my baking. Don't get too excited, theses are just camera phone pictures.

The above picture is of a pie I made. This past fall, I went to the apple orchard with some friends. I got WAY too excited, which is a typical problem of mine with apple orchards, and ended up with 14 lbs of apples. So I ate some, but baked most of them into 7 apple desserts. Good thing I have a swim team of boys to eat them. The above pie is a Paula Deen recipe, very delicious. My friend Fonzi told me it looked like a pie from a magazine, the proceeded to call me Grandma for the rest of the night.


This past December, I was having a rough time, life wise, and appointed myself chief in charge of the family Christmas cookies. The above is one of the resulting batches. They're cookie cutter sugar cookies, recipe from thejoyofbaking.com with royal icing I painted on, and some sprinkles here and there. Very delicious and festive.
This cake is an apple cake, I think from cookinglight.com, again part of the aftermath of the overenthusiastic apple orchard adventure.
This was my attempt at apple crostada, again after the infamous apple orchard visit. I learned the very important lesson that margarine is not as good as butter for pastry. Obvi. So this first attempt was a big fail. I eventually conquered it though! It was really tricky, so you have to really want some crostada.
Awwww. Red velvet heart cake!! I want to say this was the cake for my boyfriend's birthday this past year. Just regular red velvet cake in heart pans. They got stacked and frosted of course. I like to make really ridiculous cakes for my boyfriend's birthday, because he doesn't get nearly excited enough for birthdays. I FLIP OUT for my birthday. I love it. And I think everyone else should too. So, he gets crazy cakes. Which usually results in him sharing really large cakes with his dad, who LOVES cake.
Hahahahaha. Another really ridiculous boyfriend birthday cake. This had to have been like two years ago. It's six layers, three different flavors: chocolate, funfetti, and vanilla. I was really proud of this cake, even if it leaned a little. You had to make really tall, thin slices, or you ended up with WAY too much cake and frosting :-) And I did frost the outside, it just wasn't my best frost job so I didn't post it.
Aliens invade!!! These little cuties are alien cupcakes. I had a whole neon green invasion lined up on my counter. Chocolate cupcakes with a toothpick sticking up out of the middle, then you skewer on a giant marshmallow, and top it with a cake donut. The tricky part is the frosting. You gotta dip 'em in the green frosting. That's tricky because you have to get the perfect consistency so the frosting doesn't melt off, but it also doesn't suck the marshmallow and donut hole of the toothpick.
The first cheesecake I ever made!! Obviously before I learned about water baths. I also learned that you can't beat anything in nonstick pans, cause you'll chew up the pan (hey, I was in college, cooking supplies were limited). I bribed a friend of mine to read over my senior project and edit my footnotes with this cheesecake. He then hoarded it and guarded it with his life and did not share.
Sushi Rice Krispy treats!! This photo looks like shockingly good photography for me, but the sushi technique is all me. They were very tasty. I couldn't find green fruit roll ups, which saddened me, but they were delicious all the same.
Monkeys and Cookie Monsters!! These guys I made, along with the following rainbow cupcakes, for a bake sale recently at my grandparents church. The monkeys are vanilla cake with chocolate frosting and regular and mini (THEY MAKE MINI NILLA WAFERS!!!! YAY!!!!) Nilla Wafers. The cookie monsters are chocolate with blue frosting, marshmallows and half oreos.
I love these cupcakes. They turned out so beautiful. I'm a suck for brightly colored things. I made these using white cake from a box and gel food colors. The gel food coloring also colored Cookie Monster's fur. I ended up frosting some with chocolate jiffy and some with vanilla jiffy, then sprinkling them with rainbow dot sprinkles. The vanilla looked prettier, but I like my cupcakes and frostings to be different flavors. Not that I ate any of these...