Happy Nutella Day!

Yay it's Nutella Day! Don't you love it? Go open your jar of nutella and scoop of a big spoonful for a big nutella toast with me!

Or, you know, make something with it.
First, visit the World Nutella Day website for a round-up of all this year nutella recipe entries. I have plenty of nutella leftover, so I'm very eager for some inspiration. Also visit Ms Adventures in Italy and Bleeding Espresso for additional nutella-related excitement.

I'd go on and on about how much I love nutella, and how tasty it is, but I'm too eager to get to my recipe. I will say, though, that my grandmother is a recent nutella convert, which is great. She'd never heard of it before (I feel terrible I never baked her anything with nutella), but she currently has an Estonian caretaker who lives on nutella, so now the whole household is crazy over it. Rightly so, of course.

This year on World Nutella Day, I'm enjoying Nutella Rice Pudding. I was inspired by a mocha rice pudding I saw on taste spotting, and while I didn't want to put coffee in mine on that particular day (a snowy day, when the roads were so bad I'd already decided to leave work asap), I liked the idea of chocolate... and I had two and a half jars of nutella at home.

Nutella Rice Pudding
a wamozart12 original

1.5 cups of milk (I used skim)
1 cup fat free 1/2&1/2 (or you can use 2.5 cups of whatever dairy product you prefer, this produced a very thick and creamy pudding)
2T sugar
1/3 cup arborio rice
1t vanilla
1T cocoa powder
1/4 cup nutella

In a medium saucepan, combine the milk, 1/2&1/2, sugar, rice and vanilla. Bring to a boil and then lower to a simmer. Simmer for 40 minutes, until it has thickened and the rice is soft. Stir occasionally.

Remove from heat and stir in the cocoa powder and nutella. Cool.

Enjoy hot, warm, cold, plain or with a dollop of just barely sweetened whipped cream, or just eat it straight from the saucepan. I can't decide the best temperature: it's such a comfort food when warm, but the nutella flavor definitely deepens when it's chilled. It has a wonderfully thick texture, not runny at all. I love it. This is now my go-to rice pudding recipe- I'm sure I'll be enjoying it much more often! (fortunately, Clint doesn't like rice pudding, so I don't have to share :-D )

Here's a round up of this year's nutella recipes:
Nutella Banana Swirl Bread
Nutella Brownies
and I never blogged about these, but they're good (omg especially dunked in coffee): Nutella Cookies
I wasn't as well-organized as last year.