Nutella makes everything better! This smooth chocolate-hazelnut spread is the closest thing to food heaven as far as I’m concerned (unless you are allergic to nuts… then it would be pretty awful, I imagine.) Needing the comfort, I instantly considered just eating the whole jar with a spoon. I sat there and considered it for several minutes, actually, but in the end common sense prevailed and I decided it best to try and put it to good use. I had just bought some fresh raspberries yesterday morning and I thought since I generally only get about 6 hours before they start to go bad and/or soggy in my fridge, they’d be the perfect partner.

It was cool enough yesterday to turn on the oven for the first time all summer, so I thought it might be time to bake some muffins. Muffins! They’re breakfast. they’re a snack. They’re intrinsically portable. How could it go badly? Well, for one, you can forget to grease OR line your muffin pans and lose a whole batch of muffins. You could get distracted with other things and forget you are baking until you smell that lovely and unmistakable “oven-charred” aroma. You could burn your finger badly on the oven rack while trying to rotate pans with bare hands…or you could learn from all my mistakes and just follow the recipe I’ve included below.

My raspberries were shockingly large (insert awful joke here), so I found it easier to halve them lengthwise before gently folding them into the batter. FOLD GENTLY, people! Raspberries are fragile, unforgiving little suckers. I filled each muffin cup (9 in total) halfway with batter, spooned a little Nutella on each, and topped with the remaining batter. Don’t worry about filling the muffin cups to the top… these won’t rise too much.

Also, please note that these really need to cool completely before serving. The molten Nutella inside each muffin could cause some serious burning in the mouth, which would almost not be worth it. Overall, these made my day a whole lot better yesterday and they tasted amazing. Try some!

Raspberry-Nutella Muffins

Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup canola oil, 1 large egg, 1/3 cup buttermilk (use regular milk if you don’t have any), 1 tsp. vanilla extract, 1 cup raspberries (sliced if large), 1/3 cup Nutella. Makes approx. 9 muffins.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line your muffin pan with paper liners, or grease the pan generously. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar until blended. In a small bowl, mix together the oil, egg, buttermilk, and vanilla extract. Slowly mix the combined wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Do not over-mix, it just needs to come together. Then, very gently, fold in the raspberries.

Fill half of each muffin cup with batter, drop about 1 tsp. of Nutella on top of the batter, and then add batter to fill each cup almost the top. Sprinkle the tops with extra sugar (regular or turbinado) and bake for approximately 20 minutes. Let cool completely before serving. I dusted mine with powdered sugar after cooling. Then, try not eating them all at once. Enjoy!

I’ve done a lot of that in recent years in my personal life, but re-reading blog posts from 2007 made it pretty clear that I needed to change it up in cyberspace too. This site was stale and horribly out of date so here we are.

Old posts = gone. New posts = to be procrastinated indefinitely.
Yes, that feels right.