Happiness and Nutella

I am ashamed to say, I dream up recipes and get my inspirations very often at work. While marking up PDF documents of Reciprocating Pump General Arrangement Drawings and Process Engineering Flow Schemes, snippets of cocoa, butter, and peanuts appear. Not suddenly, more like they were lying dormant in my head and decided to rear up at a mouse click.

This is one of them. It's actually an adaptation of the almost greaseless Hot Milk sponge cake, devilled up with cocoa, coffee, more grease (it really does make it better, and that is the truth) and a Nutella filling.

I have Nutella in little single serving packets, courtesy of a work trip to the UK, where every morning I'd sneak in two or three from my breakfast buffet to eat later in the evening for supper. Well, that was before I met sticky toffee pudding at room service, and that became my daily supper. The packets of Nutella were tossed aside daily, and at the end of my trip I dumped them all into my luggage and lugged them back halfway across the world, and they have been lying in my fridge since then (I mean November last year). I tried spreading some on white milk bread, but found the chocolate taste too little and the sweetness too much. I don't know if it's the cold weather in the UK that makes everything not sweet enough, suffice to say I had to do something creative with my stash as I wasn't going to finish my Nutella neat. Hence the daydreaming at work.

Back to the cupcakes. I reckon about a quarter cup of Nutella was used, cut into little chunks and chilled so that they don't melt too fast during the baking.

I used oil in leau of butter, of course butter is better, but let me assure you, this was not half bad - after all, after a homemade dinner, we each downed 2 cupcakes, biting into the spongy cake and melted, gooey filling filling the mouth with spongy, bittersweet cake (made so with coffee and cocoa, and less sugar than normal sponge) and gooey melted Nutella. Now this will finish up the stash in no time.

I actually brewed the coffee by boiling up the milk for the cakes and then pouring the hot milk into a coffee press with my grounds, but that was because I needed to conserve my Nescafe and needed to find a use for my coffee grounds anyways. I, Nescafe convert since I was 11 and will be till the day I die, believe that 2 teaspoons of these crystals will do the trick - simpler and less cleanup after.


Cocoa Sponge Cakes with a Nutella filling
1 cup minus 3 tbsp AP flour
3 tbsp cocoa
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/c cup milk
2 teaspoons instant coffee or 1 batch coffee grounds
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons oil or melted butter
1/4 cup Nutella, cut into pieces and chilled

Preheat oven to 16o degC.
Beat egg yolks and sugar till pale, almagated and the mixer/whisk, when lifted up, trails ribbons on the batter.
Meanwhile, put the milk in a clean saucepan with the
Sift the dry ingredients together and fold into the egg mixture.
+nutella in a small saucepan on low heat, stirring occasionaly to prevent the nutella sticking to the bottom and to mix it all up.
Sift the dry ingredients.When bubbles start to appear in the milk, turn off the heat and add the coffee.
Slowly, whisking all the time, pour the hot milk mixture into the batter.
Grease and flour your cupcake pan.
Fill each cup halfway up with the batter, then add the Nutella chunks in a single layer. Fill the rest with batter, leaving a half-centimetre gap for the cupcakes to rise.
Bake for 20 minutes.