"Today on
Martha Stewart Living we'll be serving
Peanut butter cups. Now while I like to make my own peanut butter cups with peanuts and
cacao beans I pick from my very own garden, sometimes there just isn't time for that. So we're going to make an easy shortcut that only requires four days of preparation!
"Now, let's go over to the kiln where the four mortar and pestles and the special Peanut Butter Cup platter I've prepared for today's little exercise are. See how the cerulean on the plate exactly matches the table cloth I've chosen? You may want to vary it by using another complementary color. We're just going to put the plate aside for a moment and concentrate on a few other things.
"On the stove I have some white chocolate slowly melting in a saucepan -- next week we'll visit my forge and we'll discuss how you can make your own chocolate melting saucepans, but for today you can just use any regular two quart copper saucepan made in the Loire region of France. Over here on the counter I have some luscious red raspberries I've hand-picked from my garden as well as some blueberries and a few ripe boysenberries, this particular species I've cultivated myself. I've also pre-prepared 23 Reese's peanut butter cups by removing the paper, rounding the edges with my peanut butter cup knife, cutting them into eights and then dipping them in my own chocolate and placing them in the freezer overnight to set, it's that easy. We're going to get our peanut butter cups out and set them on the work space.
"It looks like my white chocolate is at the perfect molten stage, and we're ready to begin, so let's remove this from the fire. And very quickly we're going to mash our de-seeded raspberries, blueberries and boysenberries each in their own indivudual mortars that I've color-coded for convenience. Now we're going to add a little cream, and I'll let you in on a secret, my cow hasn't been giving the best milk lately, so I'm just going to use store-bought cream! Then we add some sugar, and I like to harvest cane sugar for this, although I also grow sugar beets. Notice how the color of the blueberry paste now precisely matches the peanut butter cup plate, this is important.
"With the last mortar and pestle we're going to take some gold dust and grind it into a slightly finer powder. Now with that done, let's prepare the peanut butter cups. First we take a paintbrush and delicately coat the tops of the cup slices, remember it's important that your strokes go the same way and that none drips down the side, you're serving these to guests. After the white chocolate solidifies some, we're ready to start using our berry pastes. With your berry painting brushes that you should have already made, delicately paint the tops of the cups in the following patterns. It's important to be exact with this, so you might want to practice a few times before attempting to serve this. Now, we're going to assemble our peanut butter cup wedges on the special plate we've made as follows. Isn't that lovely? Now we're going to sprinkle our gold dust lightly over the top, and voila a fun and festive Easter Bunny peanut butter cup mosaic that's easy and delicious!
"Reese's Peanut Butter cups, they're a good thing!"