How to Make Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at Home


 * 1) Diverging from the recipes, I used semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate (I don't like milk chocolate), and light sour cream (just happened to be what was in the fridge), I used a mixture of creamy and chunky peanut butter, and I didn't add chopped peanuts.
 * 2) I I mixed together all of the ingredients except the peanut butter and chocolate, and made a smooth mixture out of it.
 * 3) In goes the peanut butter. This part was weirdly fun. It was like that stage of muffin-making when everything goes from being a random assortment of powders and liquids to a genuine proto-baked good. Also, it tasted good when I dipped my finger in it.
 * 4) After the peanut butter is mixed evenly with everything but the chocolate, I put the peanut-butter paste into the fridge to cool down for a couple hours for easier handling.
 * 5) About half an hour before taking out the peanut butter, I melted the chocolate. This is where, if I were a fancy chef or food-blogger type, I'd talk about pulling out my double boiler and carefully checking on it constantly with a candy thermometer. I'm not a fancy anything. I stuck the chocolate in the microwave and stirred till it was smooth.
 * 6) This was easily the toughest part of the recipe. It looks easy enough to "drop 1 tsp. melted chocolate into mini-muffin tins, then spread up on sides 3/4 inch up" on paper, but I'll tell you that it's an absolute nightmare in real life. I ended up thinking of the melted chocolate as paint, and the back of a shallow teaspoon as a brush I used to "paint" the inside of the mini-muffin cups. That seemed to do the trick, for the most part (see "Mistakes Were Made" below). After the cups were filled, I stuck them in the fridge for about 30 minutes, till the chocolate firmed up. You'd be amazed what odd spots I found chocolate smudges on while I cleaned up after this stage.
 * 7) Out came the chilled peanut-butter mixture and the chocolate cups.
 * 8) Into each chocolate cup went a one-teaspoon dollop of peanut-butter mix. I flattened the tops of each mound to make sure they didn't peek over the tops of the sides of the chocolate cups.
 * 9) I re-melted the chocolate that was remaining in the bowl and filled each peanut butter-filled cup with it.
 * 10) Back in the fridge for a half hour or so to firm up the chocolate again, and then they were ready. You can see the result above. They were definitely messy eatin' (and makin'), but I daresay I prefer my homemade clones to the store-bought originals.