Robicelli's Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Cupcakes

All this week, our friends Allison and Matt from Robicelli's will be sharing recipes from their cookbook Robicell's: A Love Story, with Cupcakes, answering our questions, and giving away a book every day.

Today: The Robicellis' inaugural cupcake happens to combine all of our favorite snacktime treats.

The first cupcake Matt ever added to the Robicelli's repertoire was “The CPB:” Chocolate cake and peanut butter buttercream topped with roasted peanuts and rich chocolate ganache. Sounds awesome, right? Of course it's awesome -- how the hell can you screw something like that up? Of course, we eventually tired of awesome and needed to go past that to “mind blowing.” So we decided to roll the entire damn thing in crushed up pretzels and pour more chocolate over the top. You're welcome.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel

Chocolate Cake

3/4 cup cocoa powder
2/3 cup scalding hot coffee
2/3 cup buttermilk
2/3 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Peanut Butter Buttercream

1 recipe French Buttercream or American Frosting
1/2 cup all-natural peanut butter
1 teaspoon kosher salt

Chocolate Ganache

1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup semisweet chocolate, chopped
Pinch sea salt

To Finish

3/4 cup roasted peanuts
1 1/2 cups pretzels

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photo by Eric Isaac

Want to win a copy of Robicellis: A Love Story, With Cupcakes? Tell us in the comments: What was the first cupcake you remember making? We'll choose one random winner each day, and announce them this Friday! (Unfortunately, we can only ship books within the US.)