Cinnamon & Brown Sugar Cupcakes with Nutella Cream Cheese Frosting

Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Cupcakes with Nutella Cream Cheese Frosting

For months I’ve had an abandoned jar of Nutella, leftover from my semi-annual crepe-days in college.  I like Nutella, but I’ve never been over-fond of Nutella on toast, so the jar has languished in the cupboard until I found it, digging around for a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, and, naturally, an idea for cupcakes came to mind. Chocolate Hazelnut with a little bit of love from Cinnamon has been delightful in the past, but I wanted to mix up the standard Chocolate-Hazelnut-Cupcake with Cinnamon accent frosting; thus the Cinnamon & Brown Sugar Cupcake with Nutella Cream Cheese Frosting.

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More Hazelnuts and Chocolate and Veganism

As a dutiful offspring, I needed to make something particularly charming and fancy for my maternal unit’s day of birth.

Birthday Cupcakes!

Of course, I’m also obsessed with pudding filling in cupcakes, so I totally went down that road again, and went down the hazelnut-chocolate cupcake road again.

The delicate crumb the nut meal lends to these cupcakes is so…seductive is a weird word to use in relation to cupcakes, isn’t it?

In any case, what makes these cakes special is the Frangelico in the pudding filling, and the frosting.  Up until I had the tin of ground cinnamon in my hand, hovering over the bowl of sugar and margarine, I was going to make chocolate frosting.

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There is so much going on with these cupcakes I don’t even know where to start

 

Apparently my current fixation is cupcake fillings

Okay, so these were labor-intensive little buggers.  After the orange-chocolate cupcakes earlier, my associate AWGster commented that ze would prefer something much less…orange-y, as filling.  Which is how these were born.

I’m really digging the texture that adding nut-meal to cupcakes gives–I feel like the cupcakes are more moist and tender and have a really good…umm, well, I’ve only heard this in the context of coffee and wine, but mouth-feel.  Anyways, it’s awfully lucky I’m not allergic to nuts.

So these cupcakes are chocolate hazelnut cupcakes, with a hazelnut buttercream frosting, chocolate ganache topping, and a chocolate pudding filling, and ALL are vegan, because I’m totally a winner.

These cupcakes took forever to make, but are definitively worth it.

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Vegan Chocolate Hazelnut Cupcakes

The finished product!

I really wanted these chocolate hazelnut cupcakes, and the easiest way to get such cupcakes was modify these cupcakes.  It was super super easy and I fully recommend it.

Basically, I omitted a couple tablespoons of flour, bringing it down to just 1 cup of flour, and added a quarter cup of cocoa powder.

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The Coming Vegan Cupcake Uprising

Ziplock bag piping is punk rock

This time, hazelnut cupcakes with vegan hazelnut mocha mousse filling piped in.

These…were a lot of work, but the results were pretty darn good.  These, like many delightful baked goods, involve an alcoholic beverage.  I would very much like to try to make chocolate stout cupcakes.  I’ll post when that does happen.  I’m in a town with a beer culture that means I can go to the grocery store and buy craft beer–which is a great situation to be in when you’re a beer fan.

Anyhow, on to these little charmers.  These are from the Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero’s Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World, which you should strongly consider buying.

This is a time consuming project, make no mistake.  Is it worth it?

Totally.

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