Happy Nutella Day!

Money shot.

My inaugural "official blog" post will be my entry for International Day of Nutella, which happens to be February 5th. Delightful!




I've been experimenting with cupcakes of late, because they're delicious and cute, and people love them. But mostly because they can be made singly if I'm uncertain of the effects of some of my ideas, and ruining one cupcake sucks a lot less than ruining an entire cake. Which I've done.

So in the spirit of Nutella Day, I thought I'd do a Nutella themed cupcake. Plus it gave me an excuse (as if I needed one) to go out and restock my Nutella supply. It never seems to stay in my kitchen for long. . .

My plan was to make a hazelnut cupcake and frost with a buttercream featuring the chocolate-hazelnut flavored Nutella. However. Hazelnut extract has proven extremely difficult to find, and I don't have a proper food processor to dustify actual hazelnuts for a batter, so I switched to an almond-flavored cake. Like it mattered. These cupcakes are basically a vessel for the frosting. Here we go!

The Cake Part:
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups self-rising flour
1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons milk

I started with all of my ingredients measured out. This is how adults cook. I learned it last month.

My Mise for this project.

Next I creamed my butter and sugar and incorporated my eggs. Batter is forming. More so after the addition of the dry and wet ingredients.

Locked and loaded.

So far so good. I filled the cups about 3/4 and tossed them carelessly in the oven. I'm a badass like that.

Perfectly measured.

I pulled them a couple of minutes early, my oven tends to cook a bit more quickly than recipes would like it to. I think I made the right call. Alton Brown would describe these cupcake tops as "GBD." I'm not going to tell you what he would mean by that.

Poof!

The Frosting Part:
3/4 cup unsalted butter (room temp)
3 cups confectioner's sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup very soft Nutella

Here we go with the Nutella! I used a half cup of the good stuff. Then I ate the rest with a spoon. Just kidding. Or am I?

Pants zipped? Good, let's get at it.

The frosting was just a standard chocolate buttercream recipe with Nutella substituting for the standard melted chocolate. It worked out pretty well - fresh Nutella has about the consistency of melted room-temperature chocolate.

Nutella at 50% intensity!

The Results:

The recipe turned out really well. It rose pretty much perfectly, so I'm glad I used self-rising flour instead of AP. The cake was really light and fluffy, with a tight crumb and tender consistency. I made the right call pulling them a bit early, they were moist and the tops were a lovely bit of crunch on top.

I gave them over to my quality assurance engineer.

Game face!

ZOMG!
You can cook!

I'm pretty pleased with how this project turned out. I'll definitely use both the cake and the frosting recipes again - they were easy and tasty. I also have a ton of leftover frosting, despite my best efforts to push maximum capacity per cupcake. I'll leave my comment section open to suggestions as to what I should do with the rest. . .

Success!