fantastic peanut butter cups!

[dianafoot]

I worked these up yesterday because I love the peanut butter cups with dark chocolate coating. I figured that I did not need to make the coating very sweet if the peanut butter filling inside was sweet enough to compensate. I have trouble sweetening chocolate without using sugar, as many of the alternatives leave an unpleasant bitter or cooling effect when combined with chocolate. So I sweetened the chocolate only minimally with a few drops of liquid splenda and then made the filling sweet enough to make it a candy. These came out very well in my opinion!

I used inexpensive candy forms that I found at AC Moore for 99c for these.

Peanut Butter Cups With Dark Chocolate Coating
Coating:
• 1 ½ Lindt bars, 99% chocolate
• 2 tbs unsalted butter
• 5 drops SweetzFree or to taste. I like the very dark bittersweet chocolate to cover these, since the peanut butter interior is sweeter.
Filling;
• ¼ cup natural peanut butter, oil poured off from the top as much as possible
• 2 tsp sweetener equivalent, or to taste (I used tagatose, but anything would work here)
Preparation
• Heat the chocolate with the butter in a microwave for 1 minute or until the butter is melted and you can stir the chocolate until it is all liquefied.
• Add the SweetzFree or sweetener of choice*
• Drizzle enough chocolate mixture into the candy forms to cover the bottom of the forms
• Freeze for about 10 minutes to harden
• Spoon about ½ teaspoon of the sweetened peanut butter on top of the chocolate coating in each candy form, being careful to keep it in the center and not touching the edges of the form.
• Remelt the rest of the chocolate mixture briefly in the microwave
• Spoon chocolate over the peanut butter until it is well covered and the chocolate surrounds the peanut butter on all sides.
• Refrigerate until candies are solid
• When ready to eat, pop the candies out of the mold
• Keep uneaten candies refrigerated in a plastic zip-lock bag


• drops of SweetzFree work here because you don’t have to dissolve granulated sweeteners in water, which would seize up the chocolate. Erythritol and xylitol are tricky to use with chocolate, as they need to be well-dissolved and will crystalize easily when refrigerated, creating that “cooling” effect, which is unpleasant in chocolate in my opinion.

I kicked these up a notch by sprinkling a few crystals of sea salt on the candies just after spooning on the last bit of chocolate coating. Excellent!

[dawnyama]

Mmmmm. These look wonderful!!!! Thanks for sharing.

[buttoni]

OMG they came out so pretty and look soooo good, Diana! I love, love, LOVE peanut butter cups, but just can't have desserts much these days. But I'm printing out your recipe so I can make some of these for a major holiday treat. Thanks for sharing it with us.

[at_last]

Those look great, Diana! Can I ask where you found the 99% Lindt? The highest I can find locally is the 90% at Walmart.

[dianafoot]

Originally Posted by at_last

Those look great, Diana! Can I ask where you found the 99% Lindt? The highest I can find locally is the 90% at Walmart.

The only place I have found the 99% Lindt is at Fresh Market. do you have Fresh Market where you live? Otherwise, you'd probably have to look online or just settle for using 90%, which has a little bit of sugar. I like the Lindt chocolate because it is so smooth and not bitter like most baking chocolate.

[rosethorns]

They look wonderful Diana!!!!!! I use 100% Ghirardelli chocolate that I love. Just like a Lindt bar.

[at_last]

Thanks - We don't have Fresh Market here in the Ozark boonies. I like Lindt too so guess I'll keep using the 90% unless I luck onto some 99% somewhere. I'll look for the Ghirardelli too.

[dianafoot]

I am sure the Ghirardelli chocolate would work well here, too. I just like for the chocolate on these to be very very smooth, and some of the more available unsweetened baking chocolate is a little too grainy.

[dianafoot]

By the way, I realized that I didn't give the amount of chocolate, exactly, in case anyone wanted to use a different chocolate than the Lindt 99% bars. Each bar is 1.8 oz., so you would need about 2.7 oz. of unsweetened or bittersweet chocolate in the recipe.