My baking bug has disappeared for quite some time now. It hasnt come back just yet, and these lovely cupcakes were made by Andi, my mom and my brother. What did I do? I just helped testing the taste, washing the dishes and give advise every now and then ;)

These cupcakes were made using the recipe from Hummingbird Cookbook Bakery. I dont know if it’s the pregnancy hormones or what, but for some reason I found it overly sweet. I put a note in the book to skip the bit where we have to put a dollop of Nutella in the middle of the cupcake, cos I think that’s what made it overly sweet. Anyways, here are the recipe - enjoy! :)

Ingredients

100g plain flour
20g cocoa powder
140g caster sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
a pinch of salt
40g butter, at room temp.
120ml milk
1 egg
120g nutella (It says to use 120g, but we ended up using only 40g, and that is too sweet already!)

1. Preheat your oven to 170°C
2. Pour the flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, salt and butter in a bowl and beat with an electric whisk on a slow speed until everything is combined and of a sandy consistency.
3. Next slowly add the milk, mix well, then add the egg and mix until everything is combined.
4. Spoon the mixture into paper cases until they are half full.
5. Bake in pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes. The sponge should spring back when touched.
6. After the cupcakes have cooled, hollow out a small section in the middle and filled it with some Nutella. (Note: Next time we make this again, I think we’re going to skip this part as I said earlier it made the cupcake taste overly sweet)

For the icing:

Note: We found that the measurement for the icing below is a bit too much for the cupcakes made with measurement above. But maybe that’s because we didnt use much icing on top of our cupcakes..

250g of icing sugar, sifted
80g of unsalted butter at room temperature
25ml of whole milk
80g of Nutella

1. Beat the icing sugar and butter together with your electric whisk until mixed well.
2. Switch to a low speed and add the milk until well mixed. Turn to a high speed and beat for about 5 minutes until the mixture becomes fluffy. The more you mix, the fluffier it will get.
3. Finally stir in the Nutella by hand until distributed evenly.
4. Pipe or spoon a dollop of the icing mixture on top of the cupcake, covering the Nutella-filled holes.
5. For decoration we added Maltesers on top..

Makes 11 cupcakes