Candy Bar Stuffed Cookie Cups

This crazy dessert started with an email from one of my taste testing boys titled "Challenge for Tor" and had a link to a chocolate cupcake stuffed with an oreo & peanut butter cup.  The body of the email read "think you can recreate?" -- either my darling taste testers are getting smarter & are intentionally playing into my need to please & to be able to do everything or they just got lucky.  Either way, the end result was delicious.

I don't like cupcakes in general but definitely not chocolate ones so I thought I'd change it up a bit.  A few months ago I made blondies with toffee & reese cups & I really liked the batter so I decided to use that instead of the cupcakes.  Very good choice on my part!
Let me just start the photographs with this thing of beauty.  A friend from work lent me her KitchenAid -- oh. my. gosh.  I absolutely NEED one of these.  Just look at her:

I'm in love.

So, I don't know if it was the KitchenAid or just my normally crazy behavior but my thought process was as follows: I initially made 12 cookie cups.  Then I thought I should take them over to a friend's house for his birthday.  Then I thought that they were too aggressive to pair with the cake that another friend made.  Then I thought that they were too delicious not to share.  Then I thought I could use my mini muffin tin to make smaller, less aggressive versions.  Then I did.  Crazy, I know.  Between my newfound love affair with the Kitchen Aid & the fact that Amanda wasn't here to balance out the crazy, I just couldn't control myself.

The recipe that I'm going to give you is the for the big cookie cups.  I halved the batter for the minis & eliminated the oreo crust.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 sticks of butter (healthy, huh?!), melted & cooled
1 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
2 c. flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
12 mini candy bars (I used reeses & snickers)
12 oreos, halved & with cream remaining

Directions:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

You are going to get really good at halving the oreos.  I wasn't as good as I normally am so I had to use a knife to scrape the cream from one side to the other.  Place the oreo halves, cream-side up, into a well-greased cupcake tins.

Cream the butter, sugars & vanilla until light & fluffy.  Add the eggs & beat well.

Whisk together the flour & baking soda.  Slowly add the dry mixture to the wet mixture and mix until just incorporated.

Check out that batter!  YUM.

Scoop the batter into the oreo-lined cupcake tin until about halfway full.

Press the candy bar into the batter.

Scoop the remaining batter onto the filled tins.  Bake for about 15 minutes, until the edges are just starting to turn golden.

They will sink considerably once they've cooled which is fine since we heated them up and put vanilla ice cream on them.  Why not add more calories?! ;)

I didn't try one until today but they've been getting rave reviews.  After trying one, let me just say... yowsa!  Sooo delicious!

These are the mini muffins before they've been cooked.  Because they're smaller, I placed the cookie in the bottom, the candy bar on top & didn't place any more cookie over top.

They cooked for 12-15 minutes.  They, too, sunk a bit but not as much as the big ones.
With the big ones, I forgot to mark which were Snickers & which were Reese's so it was a surprise every time!  Oops!  With the minis, I put crushed Oreos over the Reese's ones...and then I forgot what the Oreos meant when I was serving them.  Fail.

I wasn't a big fan of the frosting.  I tried to cover the sunken-ness with the frosting but next time I would just deal with that without the frosting.  It was just too sweet.
Check these out though.  Soo good.