Vanilla Bean Cupcakes with Chocolate Peanut Butter Buttercream

These easy, fluffy Vanilla Bean Cupcakes are topped with a swirl of chocolate peanut butter American Buttercream and finished with a healthy dose of sprinkles. Mix and match your cupcake and buttercream recipes to make your own cupcake and frosting combinations.

Hi hi! Sneaking in here with just one more Valentine’s recipe for you - although I would absolutely make these year round, I just wanted an excuse to use some super pretty sprinkles! These Vanilla Bean Cupcakes are super simple, and extra delicious topped with a big swirl of chocolate peanut butter buttercream.

I actually don’t have a lot of cupcake recipes on the blog, which is weird because I love making them, and I love eating them! They are, to me, the perfect ratio of cake to buttercream, and I love piping buttercream and sprinkling sprinkles. Best combination of all of the fun things.

The cupcakes are my go-to vanilla cake, which is made using the reverse creaming method, which yields a finer crumb and a flatter top on the cake, making it perfect for cupcakes. As opposed to whipping lots of air into the cake through creaming butter and sugar, which creates pockets within the mixture, reverse creaming coats the flour with the fat, meaning that the flour is less hydrated, giving you a more tender crumb. The recipe comes together super, super easily, and is one of my favourites.

I topped these with a simple buttercream - a chocolate peanut butter American buttercream. I don’t often make an american buttercream, but the combination of peanut butter and cocoa powder works perfectly with the nostalgic flavour of the buttercream. American buttercream is much more simple method wise to make than a meringue or pastry cream based recipe, and I make mine slightly differently by really upping the ratio of heavy cream in the buttercream and whipping it hard, (lolololol) which gives a super light and fluffy buttercream which pipes like a dream. I went for the standard big swirl of buttercream on top of these, but you could also decorate them with an offset spatula or a different piping tip.

A few wee tips:

• I use vanilla bean paste in all of my baking. Vanilla extract works well too but paste is just the best. I always always use Heilala, who are an amazing company doing incredible things. You can purchase their products here - use the code CLOUDY20 for 20% off.
• If you like, you can make the cupcakes ahead of time - I made them the day before and stored them in an airtight container at room temperature.
• Mix and match these with any buttercream that you like! There’s a whole bunch on the site - this is a great way to use up any extra buttercream that you may have around.
• My cupcake liners were a little short so my cupcakes got a bit of a tan line - don’t be like me and buy higher liners so this doesn’t happen to you too.

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