Nutella Frosted Chocolate Cupcakes

It's time to resurrect this blog, and I'm not sure there's an appropriate way to do it except with chocolate.

Also, Jessica graciously offered to trade dinner for chocolate baked goods, so this one's for her. For her chocolate cupcakes, I used this recipe and adapted it slightly because I don't have vinegar. When I look fro a recipe, I simply google what recipe I want and find the one with the highest ratings. Many great baking websites will display the number of stars the recipe's been voted right in the search results. Look at how many  votes there are, and how highly they've voted it. It's never gone wrong.

Another draw to this recipe that there are no animal or dairy products, which can be a health draw. (Or, if you simply don't have eggs or milk in the house, recipes such as these are great finds for using what you do have.)

Here's the adaption:  lemon juice instead of vinegar. You could also use milk instead of the water that's called for.

This recipe simply instructs, "mix," but I mixed the wet ingredients in first. Many recipes will call for you to mix the wet ingredients and add in the dry ingredients. The reason is that you can then slowly whisk (not mix with a spoon or spatula, but whisk) the dry ingredients in to prevent lumps, which will become hard lumps in your baked cake.

Now we need to have a word on bubbles. Bubbles are seriously bad for your cake batter. A great way to get the bubbles out of the batter is to pick up and drop the container on the counter. I would recommend spooning the batter into the cake pan or muffin tin before doing this, since spooning it in will mix air into the mixture again anyway. Do this a few times and right before you slip them into the oven, and you will have better cake from scratch. (I still cannot figure out how box cake mixes manage to come out fluffy every single time... they're pretty hard to mess up. Use this tip when making from scratch though, for fluffy, good cake.)

Remember to stick one (lovingly) with a toothpick, knife, or fork to make sure they're done when they come out of the oven. Stick the largest muffin / cupcake because it will take the longest time to bake. 

I decided to frost them with more chocolate--Nutella. I looked up several different Nutella frosting recipes, but decided to settle on using straight up Nutella, which it looked like many other bakers had used (and anyone would love). I would recommend heating up the Nutella so it will spread more easily.

Delicious!