Peanut Butter Cups in the Blanket

OK, let's get it out of the way: this dessert dish ended in abject failure. But at least it was a chance for me to use the word "abject". I hope you'll pardon my tardiness. This week turned out busier than I expected and I had wanted to redo this dessert to give you some better pictures. However, I will just admit defeat and describe what went wrong.

There are two basic components here: the chocolate and peanut butter and the puff pastries. "Puff pastry sheets" are the kind of thing I'm embarrassed to say aloud. They're thin sheets of pastry ready for baking. The idea of this dessert is to make Reese's knock-offs and bake them inside the pastries in mini muffin tins. Sounds good in theory, a little complicated in practice.

Here's problem number one: the recipe calls for a ridiculously large quantity of chocolate and peanut butter mixture. If you only want to make a mini muffin tin full (that's 9 or 12), you may as well cut this part of the recipe in half. Or, I suppose, use normal-sized muffin pans, but I'll get to that later. Anyway, it took some work to get those chocolate "baking chips" to a melted state and that's because what you're seeing is one pound of chocolate. You only need half a pound here (two thirds of one of those bags). Similarly, cut the peanut butter concoction by 50%.

Anyway, fill a mini muffin tin with alternating "layers" of chocolate, peanut butter, chocolate, and peanut butter and let them semi-harden in the fridge. Let the pastry sheets thaw and mold them into the shapes of another (or the same) tin. And here's problem number two: these sheets, when cut into ninths (which are even smaller than the recipe requests), are way too big for the tin's trays. You'll see the results of this problem when they come out of the oven below:

The edges of the pastries where they emerge around the tin are excellently fluffy. The chocolate and peanut butter (and marshmallows, yum!) were also well cooked. Unfortunately, the pastry sheets that overlapped in between the recesses were hardly cooked at all (neither were the bottoms). Ewww. Obviously, only the middles and the tops were baked evenly. The sheets were too large and/or the muffin tin too small. How can we rectify this? Well, maybe use a smallish regular muffin pan, cut the pastry sheets into smaller squares, and/or bake for even longer (put the marshmallows on a few minutes into the baking?). I would have liked to try these changes, but, alas, my job didn't not agree with my desires. Here's to wishing you better luck!
Food Network's Recipe: Peanut Butter Cups in the Blanket