I have a sweet tooth, just a quick look at some of the posts on the blog is a dead giveaway. I have to eat something sweet everyday, erm, lets just say sometimes for fear of sounding like a crazy person. From mug cakes to chocolate and everything in between. Having any kind of sweet treats lying around the house has become my weakness, as a result we no longer buy chocolate or the like. This includes Nutella, that beautiful, chocolate, hazelnutty goodness. It never lasts in our house, a medium sized tub would last a week at best. The sad reality is that I cannot control myself around Nutella, so we no longer buy the stuff. It’s chocolate hazelnut gold, I tell you!

Ok, Nutella avoidance aside, when we have had Nutella in the house, I haven’t just eaten it on bread or toast or just with a spoon out of the jar, I’ve also made Nutella mousse. You can easily make a quick single serve or make a big bowl of the stuff. It’s definitely a crowd pleaser.

I by no means invented this. If you search the internet you’ll be flooded with recipes. However at the time of making it, I wasn’t aware there were 2 ingredient versions out there or aware of just how easy it is to make. I kinda just threw it together in a bowl and mixed.

For the quick and easy single serve version, all you’ll need is 1 teaspoon of Nutella and 2 tablespoons of thickened cream. Just put them together in a bowl and mix until smooth and combined then hide behind the couch before anyone catches you, you won’t want to share.

Below you’ll find a recipe for a bigger version, fill it into a large bowl and decorate with chocolate shavings, cookie crumbs or go fresh with strawberries and raspberries. Or you can do what I did and fill them into individual small pots like below.

Peanut butter and nutella is an amazing combination. The best thing since sliced bread, or the best thing on sliced bread rather! Apart from putting together the frosting I also experimented with my own chocolate cupcake recipe. It turned out pretty well, I do think it would work better as a cake or mini cake recipe though. The recipe turned out light, moist fluffy cakes, so light and fluffy in fact that they came away from the cupcake liners, still tasty though so I’m not complaining, and definitely a good attempt for a first try at complete recipe development.

Also, you’ll notice the title of this post is nutella, peanut butter ‘frosting’. We call it icing here, but I think ‘frosting’ sounds so much better.

To get the 2 tone frosting effect I put each frosting in separate disposable bags and then into a cotton piping bag. You can of course put both frostings in 1 bag on 2 different sides, I didn’t do this for 2 reasons, I wanted the 2 frostings fairly defined and I wanted to be able to store each of the left over frostings separately. You’ll notice the nozzle above is round, I did end up changing it as I wanted something frillier.

Chocolate Cupcake recipe

125 g butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 cup plain flour

1/4 cup cocoa powder

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 cup buttermilk (1/4 cup milk + 1/4 cup yogurt)

Pre heat oven to 180C. In a mixer beat butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla essence. Add flour, baking and cocoa powder. While combining, slowly add buttermilk till completely combined. Using a spoon fill into a cupcake pan 3/4 of the way up. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.

Peanut Butter Nutella Frosting

100g butter

2 cups icing sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

1/4 cup peanut butter

1/4 cup nutella

Beat butter sugar and vanilla on a low speed at first so you don’t have any flying icing sugar. Then move to a high speed until light and fluffy. If your buttercream feels a little stiff, add in 1-2 tblsp hot water. Separate into 2 equal batches. Mix in peanut butter to 1 batch and nutella into the other. Fill a piping bag and decorate as you wish.

One of my favourite flavour combinations, peanut butter and nutella works so well together, if you’re a fan too, give this frosting a try!

PS. I was meant to post this a while ago but haven’t had a chance, so just wanted to say sorry to all those people fasting at the moment.

Don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I have to say, these are amazing! I’ve been wanting to make these for such a long time, and I finally did. There isn’t actually any ferrero rocher in these, but the flavours have been inspired by those yummy hazelnut chocolates.

Ferrero Rocher Macarons

35g egg white

15g sugar

45g almond meal

65g icing sugar

2 tsp cocoa powder

Ferrero Filling

1/4 cup nutella

12 whole roasted hazelnuts

2 tblsp crushed roasted hazelnuts

Measure out your almond meal, icing sugar and cocoa powder, grind these to a fine powder and sift into a bowl. Weigh your egg white and sugar separately. Whip whites until frothy, begin to add your sugar in a slow stream until the egg whites turn stiff and glossy. Sift almond meal icing sugar mixture into egg whites then fold gently until it just combine. Fill mixture into a piping bag and pipe onto baking paper lined baking trays. Leave the macarons to set for half an hour or more. Pre heat oven to 150C and bake for 15 mins. For a more detailed explanation, check out this post.

Fill nutella into piping bag and pipe into half the macarons shells. Place 1 whole hazelnut in the centre of the piped nutella, top with the other shell and roll the nutella edge in crushed hazelnuts.

If you love Ferroros or nutella for that matter, you’ll love these Ferroro Rocher inspired macarons.