Nutella Cupcakes!

I found the recipe to share with all of you!

You like cupcakes and you like them with frosting but you feel you don’t have the time, the patience or the skill to create beautifully frosted cupcakes. The answer? Self-frosting cupcakes. The ones I made, based on a recipe from Baking Bites, were frosted with Nutella. But I bet you can make an equally delicious batch using local peanut butter.

What is Nutella? It’s a hazelnut and chocolate spread. Kinda pricey because it’s imported and that’s why I mentioned peanut butter. If you want to make these babies using peanut butter, choose the kind that gets really soft and almost pourable at room temperature.
Can the same technique be used using melted chocolate? I did that once (see the photo) but the chocolate hardened as it cooled. The cupcakes were great while warm but not after they had cooled.
Now, how to make these self-frosting Nutella cupcakes.
The following ingredients will yield 9 large or 12 medium-sized cupcakes. It all depends on the size of you pan.

Ingredients for self-frosting Nutella cupcakes:
140 g. of butter (that’s a little less than 2/3 cup), softened to room temperature
3/4 c. white sugar
3 eggs
1/2 tsp. of vanilla
1-3/4 c. of all purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
9-12 (depending on the size of your cupcake pan) heaping tsps. of Nutella
Preheat the oven to 325^oF.
First, you need to have all your ingredients at room temperature, including the eggs and the Nutella.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

Place the sugar and butter in a large mixing bowl. With a wire whisk or a mixer, beat the butter and sugar together. Just keep beating until the mixture is light and creamy.

Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.

Add the flour mixture and mix. The mixture may appear lumpy at first…

… but keep right on mixing until you have a smooth batter. Note that the batter will be heavy and hardly pourable. Stir in the vanilla.

Meanwhile, line the muffin pan with paper cups. Use an ice cream scoop (very practical) to fill the pans until about 3/4 full.

Top with a heaping teaspoonful of Nutella. Take a toothpick, dip into the unbaked cupcake until the tip hits the bottom of the pan.

Using a scooping motion, swirl the Nutella with the batter so that some of the batter comes up on top of the Nutella.
Bake in a preheated 325^oF oven for exactly 20 minutes.

Serve warm or cooled.