Nutella Cupcakes

Back story: My boyfriend is quite possibly crazy. How else do you explain this?

Yep. Five kilos of Nutella, bought for a reason that hasn’t really been explained to me yet. As much as I would like to eat all of it myself (and on Facebook, it has already been suggested that I need to put my head inside the jar and let the chocolatey goodness ooze over my head…I don’t like that idea, too messy), I have started to think about recipes that I can include it. Firstly – don’t trust the internet. I read one recipe which said to spread some Nutella on some greaseproof paper and whack it in the freezer. Once it’s frozen solid, you can chop it up and use the bits as chocolate chips in a cookie recipe. It started melting as soon as I started to peel off the paper and turned my cookies sort of marble-y. Overcooking the cookies slightly didn’t help either.

Since it was Easter last weekend, I thought something cake-y and of course combining Mini Eggs would be a nice treat to take into the office. So, here are my chocolate cupcakes with Nutella frosting.

(I know, some cakes don’t have two eggs on. They…um…met a delicious end in my mouth while I was cooking. No regrets)

The cake recipe is my trusty sponge mix (previously blogged here) with a little addition. To make this, you’ll need:

125g self-raising flour
125g unsalted butter, softened
125g caster sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 (…ish – I just dropped it in until it looked chocolate-y enough) tablespoons of cocoa (I use Cadbury’s hot chocolate mix and no one has ever noticed. I wonder if you could use white hot chocolate powder? Next time.)
Milk

To make it, all I ever do is whack all the ingredients in the food processor except for the milk and turn it on. It’s a seriously lazy way to do things, but I only have one bowl to chuck in the dishwasher. (If you’re doing it by hand, or if you like to do things in the right order – cream the sugar and butter together, add the eggs, then the flour, then the vanilla and cocoa) Drip in some milk to bring it all together so it’s more of a cake batter consistency. Try not to eat the whole batch. Pour into cases (I got about 15 little cupcakes out of this mix, but I would probably reduce this to maybe 9-12 if I didn’t have such a big team at work!) and bake in a pre-heated oven at 200°C for about 10-15 minutes until a skewer comes out clean when prodded in. Leave to cool.

While that cools, you can make the frosting. Learn from my mistakes – don’t try to ice a warm cake. Let them cool completely. (Otherwise the butter in the icing melts and you end up with a smoothly iced cake instead of pretty piping)

You’ll need:

250g icing sugar
80g unsalted butter – softened
Milk
80g Nutella

Again, I used my food processor for this because I am lazy and it is much tidier and quicker than doing it by hand. I put the icing sugar and butter in the processor and turned it on. There isn’t enough butter at this stage to make it icing-y, so you end up with yellow looking sand. Drip in some milk so it brings it together (not too much!) and once the icing is a nice smooth looking mix, put the Nutella in and blend that in.

I was really quite pleased with my icing on these – I bought a set of giant nozzles on eBay recently and this was the first time I used them. The best thing about giant nozzles is one swirl and you’re done.

The cupcakes went down very well, although I think the icing could have done with a little more icing sugar. (The recipe above is the once I used, but I will try it with maybe 50g more next time.) I also wanted to put some Nutella inside the cake (like you do with a butterfly cake) but had already iced them when I thought of it!

Any suggestions on what to make next?