Two "Duds"

You win some, you lose some. I'd been on a roll lately with new recipes (the chocolate muffins and puppy chow bars), so it's no surprised that I stumbled on a few that less-than wowed. Granted, neither of them are bad recipes, but they were both a little tedious and just not worth it for the end product.

First up was my attempt at Homemade Peanut Butter Cups.

Recipe found here

The idea sounded great; I love the combination of chocolate and peanut butter, and subsequently love Reese's. The recipe wasn't too awful; however, at one point I was supposed to use a spoon or pastry brush to coax the chocolate up the side of the mini-muffin tin. Well, I was feeling lazy, so I decided that I'd skip that step and just make my peanut butter cups layered instead of having the peanut butter contained within the chocolate. Turns out that was a bad idea. The peanut butter mixture never "set", so biting into one of these caused the peanut butter to squeeze out the sides, and they ended up being a royal mess. They were still tasty (although as Darrell put it--there really isn't much to them besides peanut butter and chocolate), but probably not something I'll make again, even though I know user error is a big culprit for why these didn't turn out right.

I also attempted a knock-off recipe for Applebee's Walnut Blondie with Maple Butter Sauce for dessert on Thanksgiving.

Recipe found here

Again, there wasn't anything inherently awful about this recipe; the taste was pretty good, the prep time wasn't terrible, but it just didn't wow me (or most of my family). There's certainly some user error in this one as well; the recipe calls for an 8x8 pan, and all I have is 9x9, so the bars definitely baked thinner than they were supposed to. I suspect that in a smaller pan the bars would be thicker and gooier and not quite as tough. Plus, if the timing had worked out to serve them fresh, I'm sure that both the sauce and bars would have been a little better. However, there are a million dessert recipes out there that I want to try, and certainly other blondie recipes, so I don't feel too obligated to spend time trying to "fix" this recipe and do it better next time.

Feel free to give either or both of these recipes a try yourself though; just because they didn't work out for me doesn't mean they won't be the right recipe for you!