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.

Nutella Banana Bread

Ah, nutella day. It’s such an exciting time of the year!

[Note: pictures coming soon!]

Today’s nutella installment is more of a good idea than a new recipe. It’s a nice way to jazz up your favorite banana bread recipe.

My mom makes banana bread pretty often, because it’s a great way to use up old bananas. I used to have bananas on hand much more often (now I only have bananas in winter, to try to avoid a fruit fly infestation in the warmer months) and I, too, made banana bread practically every other week. But when you make something so often like that, you tend to get sick of it. Maybe that’s just me. But these days I usually give away all my banana bread. I’ll eat it fresh from the oven, but then I can’t wait to get rid of it!

Adding a swirl of nutella will help with that, I think. I already know that bananas and nutella are a wonderful combination. Here, the banana bread isn’t all that sweet, so once you get to the bite of nutella swirl, its super-sweetness is more satisfying than cloying.

Note: this isn’t my standard banana bread recipe, but I liked that it used 1/3 cup of yogurt- I have a giant container of nonfat plain greek yogurt that I’ve been struggling to use up, so I was very glad to have another use for it. You don’t have to use this recipe, you can use your own favorite. This one’s good, too.

Banana Bread with Nutella Swirl

adapted from The Family Kitchen

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, softened

1/2-3/4 cup sugar (I used 1/2, if you want it sweeter, use 3/4)

3 brown/spotty bananas, mashed

2 eggs

1t vanilla

1/3 cup plain yogurt (or sour cream or buttermilk)

1 cup AP flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1t baking soda

1/2t salt

1/3-1/2 cup nutella, slightly softened

Cream the butter and sugar until it’s sandy (it won't get too fluffy). Beat in the bananas, eggs, vanilla and yogurt.

Sift together the flours, soda and salt, and stir into the wet mixture.

Grease a loaf pan and fill with about half the batter. Spread the nutella over the batter, then add the remaining batter.

Bake at 350F for 1hr 10min.

It smells delicious, starting about 20 minutes into baking :)

Next time I make this, instead of spreading the nutella in a single layer just before baking, I’d rather fold it into the bowl of the batter to get more of a distribution. I wouldn’t mix so that it’s fully incorporated, but just so that it’s found more throughout the dough than in the single layer. Or perhaps there should be 3 layers of batter and 2 layers of nutella.

Nutella Cravings...

Good news, friends: World Nutella Day is Saturday, February 5th! So of course I've been preparing.

Clint bought me 2 jars of nutella last week, and I already had plans for them by the time they arrived in my kitchen. My plans were a little ambitious, but I'm sure I'll still use up most of that nutella.

I'm not giving these in order of when I made them, but first I want to share this recipe that had me awestruck.

Nutella Brownie Bites

Well, that sounds nice, right? Read the recipe:

1/2 cup nutella
1 egg
5T flour

That's it!! So I thought, well, these can't be that good, they're far too easy. I'm glad to say I was wrong. They took about 2 seconds to get in the oven, 10 minutes to bake, and they're amazing. (If I had no willpower, they would have taken about 2 minutes to devour.)


Procedure:
Beat 1/2 cup nutella (I softened it slightly in the microwave, about 15sec) with the egg until they're well combined and creamy. Beat in the flour.

Fill a mini muffin tin with 1T dough per well. Bake at 375F for about 10-12 minutes.

Mine were baked for exactly 10 minutes, and they came out slightly fudgy on top and had a nice cakey brownie base. They were maybe slightly underdone, but I prefer them this way.

Makes about a dozen brownies/mini muffins


I'm saving up my newest nutella recipe, of which I am quite proud (because it's a wamozart12 original, and really delicious) for the actual Nutella Day, but until then I have hopefully 2 other recipes to share. I'm not as well-organized as last year!

HAPPY NUTELLA DAY!!!!

The happiest day of the year!

Ok, maybe I'm going a little overboard, but I just love Nutella that much.

Let's recap the week.

First, I made french almond macarons with nutella filling
Then, a quick snack of grilled bananas drizzled with nutella
Third, Italian cookies with nutella filling
Nutella gelato with almonds

And, the grand finale, vanilla nutella-swirl cupcakes with nutella buttercream frosting!
I found the recipe on the 2009 recipe list of the World Nutella Day website. It's from Meet Me in the Kitchen, who got it from I Heart Cuppycakes.

The recipe is fairly easy, although it produces a much thicker cupcake batter than I've ever seen before (so I was glad for all the photos on these two sites). Makes about 4 dozen mini cupcakes (or 12-15 regular-sized cupcakes).

Cream 10T butter (room temperature) and 3/4 cup sugar until light, about 2 min. Add 3 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in 1/2t vanilla (the batter will look a little clumpy, this is ok), then sift together 1 and 3/4cup flour, 2t baking powder and 1/4t salt and mix in.
See? It's almost like a soft cookie dough. Most cakes/cupcakes I've made include milk in the batter, and this had no milk but more eggs, so I think that's the difference.

I'm taking these cupcakes to work, where potentially 10-12 people will be eating them, so I made mini cupcakes to stretch the batch (and also 6 regular-sized cupcakes, when I got tired of alllll the minis I was making), using about 1/2 a cookie scoop of batter. Soften some nutella (in the microwave for 20 sec or so), and add about 1/2-1t to the top of each cupcake cup of batter. Swirl the nutella around with a toothpick, then back at 325oF for about 20 minutes (a bit more for regular-sized cupcakes).

Once the cupcakes are cool, they're ready to frost.

Beat 1 stick of softened butter with 3 cups of powdered sugar (add 1 cup at a time). Beat in 1/4 cup half&half or whole milk (I used fat free half&half) and 1/2t vanilla. Add 1/2cup more powdered sugar and beat on high for a few minutes, until it's fluffy. Soften1/4cup nutella (in the microwave again) and beat into the frosting. If the frosting's not stiff enough, add another 1/2cup powdered sugar.

Frost the cupcakes!

I like the cupcakes, but I love the frosting. I'm very pleased to say that I have nearly 1/2 the batch of frosting left after frosting all 3 dozen mini and 6 large cupcakes.

And, um, because I can't get enough nutella, and I still have one unopened jar, I'm considering making either these nutella cookies (recipe passed on by a raveler) or these banana nutella muffins (recipe suggested by a niner).... or maybe both.

Nutella #4!

Cold nutella: nutella gelato!

I got this idea after remembering the nutella milkshakes I'd treat myself to once in a while at Boloco. They're very decadent, and probably significantly less healthy than a mango orange nonfat yogurt smoothie (my usual, if I was going for a smoothie/milkshake).

I've had an ice cream maker for just over a year, and I think this was the 6th time I've used it (orange-lemon gelato, strawberry-balsamic gelato (gelato fail- balsamic and dairy is a bad combination), kahlua gelato (formerly the favorite), and cherry vanilla gelato), the last time being in June- so even though I've used the ice cream maker several times, it'd been a while. And there were things I forgot:

Don't let the egg/milk mixture curdle. My recipe said to cook this for about 8 minutes, til thickened. After 3, it started to curdle- not bad enough to affect the finished product, but still.Once I made ice cream, and even after 40 minutes, the custard still had not thickened. I think that was an extreme, but my point is, you need to watch it, and stir frequently.

After making the custard, it needs to chill. This takes a good several hours- it's best to just let it go all day or overnight.

Chunky add-ins should be stirred in by hand. Also, nutella won't make a nice swirl, it'll kind of break up. Less pretty, but still delicious. And it'll stay somewhat solid, not creamy like a fudge ripple.

The recipe.

2 cups 2% milk (2% is important)
1/2-1 teaspoon vanilla

5 egg yolks (you can save the whites for something quick, like coconut macaroons, or meringue, or this ethereal lemon frosting that I'm going to try this weekend)
1/2 cup of sugar

1/2 cup coarsely chopped, toasted almonds
1/2-2/3cup nutella

Scald milk and vanilla in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Meanwhile, beat egg yolks and sugar until lemon-colored (a few minutes, with a whisk)

Temper the egg yolk/sugar mixture: add a ladleful of scalded milk and whisk, add another ladleful, whisk, and continue til about half the milk mixture is added to the eggs. Then return the egg/milk to the milk in the saucepan and cook- here's where it's tricky. I cooked over medium/medium-high heat for 3 minutes, which was just barely too long. The custard should thicken to coat the back of the spoon, but sometimes it's frothy and hard to tell. So just keep spooning the mixture to check to see if it's curdled- if it just barely starts to curdle, it'll still be ok. And keep stirring gently.

Strain the custard into a bowl (definitely strain it), and chill until it's thoroughly chilled- I like to just chill it overnight, then you know it's definitely cold. It must be cold when it goes into the ice cream maker, or else it won't freeze. Chilling takes at least 3 hours.

Once the custard's chilled, add it to the ice cream maker. Follow the directions on your ice cream maker. On mine, the kitchenaid attachment, I set up the pieces and start the mixer going on the lowest setting, then slowly pour the chilled custard in.

I let that go for 20 minutes, until it seemed ice cream-y solid. At this point, it basically gets to a soft serve consistency. Then stir in the almonds (I tried using the mixer's paddle, but the almonds just clumped up, so I switched to a spatula by hand) and the nutella.

Transfer to a bowl and freezer for a few more hours (again, I prefer chilling the cooked custard overnight, making the ice cream the next morning, and chilling orver the day to have fresh ice cream for dessert) and voila, ice cream! With nutella cookies, of course.
I feel like every time I make ice cream, the newest flavor I try is the best. This definitely continues in that trend. The nutella stays kind of solid, so you get little bits of nutella, instead of smooth nutella swirl (and this is how I like my sundaes, when the hot fudge gets a little solid where it touches the ice cream). The toasted almonds go nicely with nutella- I would have preferred hazelnuts, but I didn't have any on hand.

Nutella #3!

I decided to try an Italian recipe for an Italian treat. I made a sugar/butter cookie normally filled with jelly, and did the easy substitution of nutella. I used a recipe from an Italian cookie cookbook I got for Christmas (Sweet Maria's Italian Cookie Tray).

Cream 1 stick softened butter with 1 cup of sugar. Add 1/2 cup of sour cream (I used 1/4 cup sour cream and 1/4 cup nonfat plain yogurt) and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Then slowly add 2.5 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda (no salt- I think I should have added 1/2 teaspoon salt).

Knead the dough on a floured board for a minute or 2, then shape into discs, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill for a couple hours.

Roll out dough thinly, maybe 1/8 inch thick. Cut with a 2 inch round cookie cutter. Spoon 1t nutella (or jelly- I'm actually running out of nutella, so I used some lingonberry jelly I had), fold edges over and bake for 12-15 min at 350oF.
And I was surprised to note this: when the cookies were fresh from the oven, the nutella was nice and warm, but the cookies didn't have enough flavor for me. I preferred the lingonberry ones, with the nice tangy jam. I was a little ashamed to admit I preferred the non-nutella cookies during nutella week. But lo and behold, the next morning, I had one of each cookie with my morning coffee, and I am pleased to say that the next day, the nutella ones are delicious. So, bake them, and wait a day to enjoy them- by all means, though, eat the ugly ones (the ones taht leak, or the cookies don't stay folded over) fresh from the oven.

Tomorrow I plan to tell you about a sweet treat to eat with these cookies. Hopefully it'll turn out well.

Nutella #2

Welcome back to Nutella Week!

After a vigorous zumba class the other morning, I came home, showered, and needed some sort of snack. I have lot of grapefruit, but I needed something more substantial. Yet I didn't want something too filling.

So I had grilled bananas with nutella drizzle.

I based this on a Sandra Lee recipe for grilled bananas foster (which would have been good, but I wasn't in the mood for making a sauce).

2 bananas
1-2T nutella, warmed a bit in the microwave for 20sec

Cut the bananas lengthwise, and cut the ends off. Place on a preheated grill pan that's been sprayed with a lot of non-stick spray, flesh side down. Grill over medium-high heat for 4 minutes. Flip over, and grill peel side down for 4 minutes.

Transfer to plate, leaving the peel on, and drizzle with nutella.

On eating this lovely, delicious and super easy snack, I recalled that there's hardly anything more decadent and homey than warm bananas. Adding the nutella brings out the banana-ness in a way that I can't explain- it's like chocolate on bananas, but better, more complex (hazelnuts, duh, I know). After making this, I think bananas should be an obvious pairing for nutella.

Instead of dipping a banana in peanut butter, I'm tempted to dip it in nutella now.

Nutella Week!

This Friday is World Nutella Day, and to celebrate this momentous day, I'm going to share a different nutella recipe each day this week. Some of the recipes will be Nutella recipes, really emphasizing Nutella, and others will be recipes that merely include the silky, creamy, dreamy taste of Nutella. Today's recipe is from the second category. Tomorrow's recipe will be more of the first.

First we have something I was excited about before I thought to use nutella in it: French macarons. Bakerella went to a macaron-making class, and blogged about it great educational detail. Because I've wanted to make these for several years, ever since my dad brought home a box from a business trip to France, I jumped on this tutorial and made my own as soon as I could.

The recipe is different than anything I've ever done before. It's kind of like the amaretti I made before Christmas (with little success, they were hard as a rock, and not in a crunchy-crispy way). But 1. you need to measure by weight, not volume. As luck would have it, I have a kitchen scale. 2. you use egg whites, but you have to age them. I'd never seen anything lke this before. The reasoning is simple: fresh egg whites are too wet, they need to dry out a bit. Huh.

90g egg whites (about 3 large egg whites- my 3 egg whites were 100g, so I adjusted everything else accordingly). Dry them 24hrs in a loosely covered contained, at room temperature. Tartelette, who taught the macaron class, says you can age them longer, but put them in the fridge.I aged mine 24 hours in a deli container lightly covered with plastic wrap, on the counter (after warning my husband 1. not to knock them over, and 2. I meant to leave them there).

The next day, I beat the egg whites with 30g of granulated sugar in the mixer, until stiff but not dry.
While that was going, I weighed out 200g powdered sugar and 110g almond flour (I opted not to grind the almonds myself, I did that for the amaretti, and they were pretty chunky).
wooo kitchen scale! I had no idea I'd love this so much. I actually mostly got it for weighing yarn, and partly because Alton Brown says I should have one.

I whisked the almond flour and powdered sugar together, and dumped it in the egg whites. I folded it in by hand. Go see Tartelette about this, she gives good instructions on how exactly to add these together. Basically, dump the almond/sugar in, and fold it with a spoon for a few quick strokes. Then slow down the stirring until it's smooth, and you don't want to beat more than 50 strokes. Drop a bit of the batter on a plate and it should stay smooth, not crack- if it cracks, beat a few more strokes.

Anyway, go see Tartelette about that.

I colored my batter with paste food coloring: pink and red. The 2 bowls of batter were vivid, but pink and darker pink, nowhere near red. Ah, well, not a big deal. I transfered the batters to a piping bag, and ideally I would have used a big round tip, but I only had a big star tip- it ended up being fine, the batter's so liquid that it settled out on its own. I piped 1-1.5inch wide circles, and then let them sit on the sheet for an hour to harden. (Note: space the circles far enough apart, and remember that the batter's liquidy and will settle out a bit. I had some problems with my macarons running into each other).

Then bake for 18-20 minutes at 300oF.

Ok, so I had some issues somewhere along the way. My macarons didn't rise very much, and they got a little wrinkly on top. At first I thought it was an oven temperature problem, but now I'm wondering if my batter was was too wet, and I should have dried the rounds longer before baking.

But regardless, I turned an iffy result into something great, because I filled them with nutella!

A day after filling them, they have a really nice texture- kind of crisp, but kind of soft, and not in a sticky-soft-can't-bite-it way (if that makes sense).

Moral of the story: take a fancy recipe, have mediocre results, add nutella, and great success!

Tomorrow's recipe will have more emphasis on nutella, but this one was worth sharing anyway.

The healing properties of Nutella

I had a bad day yesterday. Nothing serious, just many, many little things going wrong, culminating in getting a trojan virus on my computer. Luckily, my virus protection software is up to date! Thank you, Norton! But needless to say, by the time I returned home, I was in kind of a mood.

Now, the day before, I'd read the newest issue of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food. I really love this magazine, but this month I think it's really surpassed its previous excellence in giving me a ridiculous number of delicious (and healthy!) recipes to try. The very last recipe of the magazine is always a cookie recipe, and this month it's nutella sandwich cookies, using whole wheat flour and oats- so it seems rather healthy! (apologies- I can not seem to find this recipe online, or else I would definitely post it. I'll copy it down and post when I make a batch, though.)

With nutella cookies on my mind, I was eager to make these. However, after more thoroughly reading the recipe, I saw the dough needs to be refrigerated (and you can skimp on the time of fridging, but you can't really cut it out altogether), and the idea of rolling out whole wheat dough (it can be tricky) was very unappealing.

So I opted for another nutella treat. A friend made these for a party I threw back in April, and actually gave me the rest of the nutella (did you know nutella has a shelf life of about a year?), and her bars were ridiculously good. So I made them instead.



I made Nutella Blondies.

These were very easy. You simply melt half a stick of butter, and mix it with 1 and 3/4 cup brown sugar- that's a very, very high sugar:butter ratio. Then beat in 2 eggs and some vanilla and let it get fluffy (it gets very fluffy). Add in 2 cups of flour that's been sifted with 2t baking powder and 1t salt (I'll try 1/2t salt next time, they were overly salty, but noticeably salty), and then stir in a heaping tablespoon (and I mean heaping) of nutella and 1/3 (I used 1/2) cup toasted hazelnuts (I used almonds- I don't keep hazelnuts on hand, and I toasted the almonds for about 15 min, from the time I turned the oven on to the time it was finally up to 350oF).

Press it all into a greased 8x11 pan (I don't have such a thing, used 1 loaf pan and 1 8x8 pan) and back 25 (I did 30,, which was maybe a hair too much) minutes. Let them cool and top with a little dollop of nutella.

Now, you can see that they look good. You can imagine that they taste good. The one thing I did not expect was how ridiculously good they smell. Clint was in the living room while I baked these, and when I opened the oven to peek at them after 23 min, he had to come into the kitchen to investigate the heavenly aroma. I thought we were both going to pass out from the delicious smell. You may think I'm kdding, but I'm not- not completely.

So anyway, these are very easy, they're very good (the best blondies I've made so far, so I'm keeping this recipe to modify as needed), and interestingly enough, they're actually really low in butter. The same amount of ingredients for cookies would have 4 times as much butter, so it's possible these are healthy (I may try substituting 2/3 cup of whole wheat flour for the same amount of regular flour). Note: I'm kind of ignoring the nutella I added to this, which was about 1/3 of the total fat- nutella is unfortunately very unhealthy (I'd like to note that a friend pointed out the irony of the commercials where the mom gives her kids whole wheat toast spread with nutella, as a way to get them to have a healthy snack. Nutella is delicious, and by definition, terribly unhealthy).

Speaking of healthy, and I don't have an accompanying photo (but they weren't pretty, anyway), I made whole wheat pancakes this weekend. A friend gave me her mother's super awesome pancake recipe, and since Alton Brown taught me how to make pancakes decently (not perfectly, but I'm getting there), I've been going to town on this recipe.
2.5 cups milk
2 eggs
2T melted butter
1/4cup sugar
2cups flour
2t baking powder
1t salt

Whisk milk, eggs and melted butter, stir in sugar, add the rest of the ingredients. Cook on a greased/buttered skillet (friend said butter, but I'm finding that either works well enough). Normally I halve the recipe and add whatever fruit we happen to have in the freezer (usually blueberries, sometimes strawberries). This weekend, I wasn't in a fruit mood, I was in a gingerbread mood.

So.
substitute whole wheat flour to be one third of the total flour (i.e. 2/3c whole wheat, 1 and 1/3c regular flour)
brown sugar instead of white sugar
2t cinnamon, 1t ginger, 1t nutmet, 1/2t cloves.

Yum! It had a nice flavor from the brown sugar and spices, and an earthiness and more texture from the whole wheat flour.

Again, no pictures, because even though I can make pancakes, I still burn most of them, and you don't want to see burned pancakes when I'm trying to suggest a recipe.