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As a thank you gift to Pat and Clara, I wanted to make peanut butter cupcakes. I asked Google and found a recipe which looked straightforward and began gathering ingredients. At the same time, I took a melatonin tablet about 45 minutes before I thought everything would be done and set to work mixing. Melatonin and I, apparently, have a curious relationship. It skews my sense of time and concept of numbers and I wound up putting twice as much peanut butter in the cupcake mix. “What’s wrong with more peanut butter?” you may ask, well, a few things.
Peanut butter brings extra sugar to the mix, this acts as binding agent. It’s not particularly moist so brings little steam leavening. Finally, it’s quite fatty and having doubled the amount of the single largest ingredient kind of skewed the results. Instead of making a peanut butter cupcake, I wound up with a peanut fritter. The extra fat wound up almost frying the cupcakes as they cooked and the results were quite… dense. I gave one to my dad who requested a knife and fork.

Secondly, I wanted a way to ship these while keeping their frosting in place so, again, I asked Google which recommended I bake a few in mason jars. Once baked and cooled, the cupcakes could be iced and sealed so that they shipped properly. Genius.

From 2012 Odds and Ends

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I brought in peanut butter cookies today.  A lot of them.  When a recipe starts with “24 oz of chunky peanut butter” followed by “3 sticks of unsalted butter”, it means business.  Anyway, I sent out a blanket email when I bring something in and slowly a trickle of people came through.   A bunch of these folk were from a specific work group and three had a cookie and graciously took an extra cookie for a specific person who was “too busy to come up”.  They should have planned their excuses for gluttony better.  There person for whom they supposedly took cookies is deathly allergic to peanuts.  They’re so selfless.

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My lampshaded dog must take antibiotics twice a day and recently I’ve been rolling the pills into cheese singles and feeding Max thusly.  Today I ran out of cheese and instead made a 1/2″ ball of peanut butter with a juicy Levaquin core.  This worked well for his morning dose so I reckoned it’d be fine for the evening.  Well, Max initially licked it up and it fell to the end of his cone as a lump, in an attempt to lick it he ran his lampshade against the oven door and dislodged the ball onto the door.  Not to be deterred, he licked the door of the oven clean of peanut butter and after a flash of discovery continued to remove the dried gravy my brother spilled from yesterday’s ham.