Yummy Homemade Peanut Butter Cups

Ah, peanut butter cups. Yes, they are my absolute favorite candy on the planet. The mixture of peanut butter and chocolate takes me away from all stress of life. You might have even seen my post about what I’d take to a deserted island, and yes, peanut butter and chocolate made the list.

So it’s only natural that our first Baking with the Bickfords segment would involve making homemade peanut butter cups. I wasn’t quite ready to commit to these segments yet because I haven’t quite mastered video, but Braden insisted we bake, so bake we did! I mean, can’t let down my cute little 7-year-old, can I?

I’ve always loved to bake, and I learned a lot of my baking from buying goodies from bakeries and then bringing the items home and kind of dissecting them. How did they make this? How can I make this? And then an awful lot of experimenting. I’m hardly a recipe follower, and I love to create new things. Even better? All our Baking with the Bickfords recipes are ones you’ll be able to do with your kids, too!

We didn’t do a video segment, but we did post a live video of a snippet for you on our facebook page if you want to check that out. In the meantime, let’s get to the recipe for these amazing, yummy homemade peanut butter cups.

Oh, but first… let me just tell you the healthy part. Yes, there’s a healthy part to these! By making them on your own, you know exactly what’s in them (aka no preservatives or other fillers!) and you can make them with as little as 2 ingredients if you want!

The great thing about these homemade candies is that you can really put anything in the molds. In the photo, you can see that we have wafers (homemade KitKats), caramel (homemade caramels), chocolate spread (homemade chocolate cremes), and Rice Krispies (homemade Crunch bars) etc. The possibilities are endless!

The only ingredients you really need are peanut butter and melting chocolate, but I like to make mine a little sweeter, so I add in powdered sugar and melted butter to the peanut butter filling. You can also use crunchy peanut butter or add a bit of crushed graham cracker for filling that’s more the consistency of a Reese’s cup. It’s completely up to you.

The melting chocolate you use depends on several things. Candy melts harder at room temp and get super hard in the fridge, taking effort to bite in to. If you use only those, I recommend keeping them out at room temp. Baking chocolate chips need to be refrigerated or they will melt and not make a candy shell. I find the best way is to use 1/2 of each and then to keep them in the fridge. It makes a nice, hard shell and helps solidify the peanut butter mixture without getting too hard or being too soft. It’s a great compromise!

Be sure that you let the molds completely harden before taking out the candies, so that they don’t break or smoosh (yes, that’s a real thing!). And enjoy these yummy, homemade candies with your family!