Reese's Peanut Butter Cup cake, oh my!

I had seen a photo of this cake and fallen in love.  But seriously, chocolate cake, peanut butter icing and chocolate ganache - when are you gonna eat a cake like that??  And no-one was likely to order one, because they wouldn't know that I wanted to bake it.  So...  I had to wait for just the right occasion.  Which came during the just-ended October school holidays. 

A good friend of mine L (we met first in the post-delivery labour ward, our girls are twins-from-other-mothers), whom we don't see often enough, invited us over to play.  They'd been over to play at our place during the holiday-week before and I'd only noticed that it was her birthday in the weekend between playdates late the night before they were coming to us, and really didn't feel like baking something then.  Wrote a card, but no baking.

Then inspiration hit when she mentioned that she was going to do a peanut choc traybake for her family party at the weekend - Eureka!!  I could make this cake for our playdate, woo hoo.  I thought to make it in my new 6" tin (partly because it's less cake to eat and partly because it's kinda cute and still a novelty for me).  After checking with a mutual friend J (who was also coming to the playdate) that her peanut-allergic girls could be near the cake as long as they didn't touch it, I went ahead.

I had found these beauties recently at a nearby supermarket and had to buy them, knowing that at some point soon I wanted to need them...

I had looked up few different recipes for a peanut butter cup cake, then realised I could just muddle through it myself.  I had a chocolate fudge cake recipe that I wanted to try, so used that as the base.  Then made my usual vanilla buttercream but instead of adding vanilla I kept adding tablespoons of peanut butter until I thought the taste was strong enough.  First I used up all our smooth peanut butter, then onto the crunchy stuff.  After that I made chocolate ganache using 120ml of double cream and 120g of dark chocolate (with a bit of milk mixed in so it would be sweet enough for Mr Becca to taste some).  As you may agree, that was a bit too much ganache, as it dribbled all down the sides and pooled at the base.  But I still think it looked good, and more importantly, so did the birthday girl and everyone who saw it.

And the best bit?  It tasted amazing!!!  Rich, decadent and more-ish, yummy.