Peanut Butter & Nutella Swirled Cupcakes...

This post is dedicated to my muffin, Billie Jo.

There's this new thing out there in the world wide web called Pinterest. It's a really cool place to find all kinds of neat stuff. It's almost worse than FB as far as addiction goes. Well I should say better on some days. Better because it's all photos, and links to where you found the photos, not all this mumbo jumbo about what so and so had for breakfast and how long it took her dog to poop this morning. You don't have your dashboard filled with a "status update" every 5 minutes from the preachers wife, who you want to yell at and tell "just shut the F up already!!" but can't because you've already got enough strikes against you to begin with.

Now don't get me wrong I like FB, but sometimes people can be down right ridiculous with it. With Pinterest you organize your posts into categories, or boards, therefore allowing you & your friends, and strangers, to only follow the parts of each other you find interesting. If you don't like pets, you don't have to follow my pets board, but you can follow my food and drinks board if you have similar tastes to mine. Which brings me to today's post. Food.

Food glorious food. It is the ban of my existence, well not mine, but my hips, ass, legs, arms, belly, ring fingers, chin. . . . OKAY, the ban of my entire existence. There I said it!! I have a love/hate relationship with food. I love to eat it, and my body (particularly my midsection & ass) hate it. I've come to the realization that I can't put off losing weight and getting healthier any longer. Only problem is I have a cupboard full of stuff I'm not supposed to eat and an addiction to Pinterest which has a million and one ideas on how to cook all of that stuff I have!! I'm told my will power is stronger than I think and I'm going to be testing it here in the next month or two.

My first attempt at emptying my cupboards of the devil foods is a recipe I found on Pinterest. It's called Self Frosting Nutella Cupcakes. If you follow the link it will take you to the site the recipe originated from. It will include a recipe for cupcakes (not the box variety). Now you all know me, and if you don't just stick around I'm not that hard to figure out. You know that it's in my DNA to not follow cooking instructions. I was thinking to myself, Self what can you do to make these even better? What goes with Nutella better than anything? PEANUT BUTTER!!

My whole purpose was to get rid of the food stuffs I already had in existence so instead of using the 'from scratch' recipe provided I used a white cake box mix from my cupboard. This was my first mistake. I made the cake per directions. What I should have done is not leave out the egg yolk. The only reason you leave the yolk out is so you can have an actual white cake, which wasn't necessary in this case. With the yolk in the batter will be naturally a little thicker. My next mistake was my inability to measure anything. I wanted peanut butter flavored batter so I added peanut butter. I think I added too much, don't ask how much I added because I don't know. Whatever was left in the pb jar is what I added. Oh it tasted divine, but with lack of yolk and the added oil from the peanut butter my batter was little too fluffy and oily. By it's self it would have made a bomb ass cupcake. However when the time came to swirl in the Nutella my batter was a little too fluffy. You want your batter and your room temperature Nutella to be about the same consistency. No worries, the cupcakes turned out delicious. The way I made them just needs a little tweaking to become perfect. I suggest if you want to make them to use the recipe provided at the link the first time you make them. Then change what you will the next time. Always remember that when adding peanut butter that you are also adding oil, so be sure to cut back on your oil amount the recipe calls for.

Now for the photos:

Make your cupcake batter and add a small dollop of Nutella to the top of each cupcake.

Next you use a skewer of some sort, I used the meat thermometer, to swirl your Nutella and batter together.  I may have used too big a dollop of Nutella, it's NUTELLA! I couldn't help myself.

Bake according to directions. Be sure to check them early, you DO NOT want to over cook the Nutella.

OMG!! My house smelled like the best bakery EVER!! Be sure to let them cool a few minutes before you transfer them from the pan to cooling racks. I found that the top of my cupcakes where the Nutella was swirled was not attached to the bottom of the cupcake very well. This, I'm sure, is because I didn't follow the recipe and my batter wasn't the same consistency as my Nutella. It could also have something to do with over cooking them just a tad therefore allowing the Nutella to crystallize more. 

Here you can see that the cupcake didn't swirl together very well, my fault, and that the cupcake is very dense or heavy, again my fault. At a later date I will try these again and I will follow the directions to the tee. Well almost, I still want peanut butter flavor to go with the Nutella. Only next time I will measure the peanut butter.

Words of advice:

If you plan on making these cupcakes be sure to stock up on MILK. They are very rich and will cure any sweet tooth you have. After tasting the batter and licking clean the Nutella spoon when I was done, I was only able to taste a small piece of the finished product. OMFG! It was fantastic!!

The verdict on the cupcakes at Casa Canning  is 4 thumbs up↑. I've never been one for a whole lot of sweets, but this one is definitely worth trying and it's not hard at all. In reality you only have two extra steps.

1→make sure your batter is thick.
2→add & swirl in Nutella.

Now that I've emptied my cupboards of some of the devil foods I need to go back to Pinterest and see what I can make for dinner that will make some more of those food stuffs disappear. Wish me luck!!

Love ♥ Huggs
CoreyJo