Nutella Muffin-Brownie-Cupcakes (who cares what they're called as long as they've got nutella?!)

PHEW! Is anyone still with me? I wouldn’t be surprised if after the ghostly behavior I’ve exhibited toward this blog for the past week, a few people here or there lost faith in me. I haven’t lost interest or stopped cooking or been eaten alive by a giant jelly fish on the shores of the Atlantic ocean.  My vacation was, however, fuller and more time-constrained than I had anticipated, and so even with ample internet connection (and a week of safely avoiding killer jelly fish), I struggled to log on for updates. Every morning I woke up at 7am and quite literally did not finish my summer preparatory work for my dietetic internship until 2-4pm. Every. Single. Day. I hope you aren’t offended that with the approximate 4.5 remaining hours of daylight I chose the beach and boardwalk over blogging.

But now I’m back, and although I still have ridiculously demanding course work and case studies, I at least don’t have the beach and boardwalk shops to distract me. I’m even prepared to formally apologize for being so lame this week, and by apologize formally, I mean share a recipe for a really delicious brownie-muffin-cupcake-I-don’t-care-what-you-call-it-nutella-dessert. And it’s almost good for you, too! If you believe the Nutella commercials, then it’s definitely good for you. But in the real world, it’s just almost healthy, because nowhere but in an alternate universe could Nutella be considered anything but a jar of glorified, spreadable fudge. It is delicious, though, isn’t it?

So delicious, in fact, that these incredibly simple 3-4 ingredient muffin-cupcakes (I hesitate to call them muffins for fear of insinuating that they are proper Monday-Friday breakfast food) are equally, incredibly, magnificently delicious, too. They actually aren’t as overly decadent as the Nutella in them would have you believe – their flavor is subtle, with this low-key chocolate flavor permeating it. They used to be called brownies, as in, by the blogger who originally came up with the recipe. They are not brownies, they are light and fluffy muffins, but that’s ok, because a Nutella brownie-muffin by any other name does, in fact, taste as yummy.

I really shouldn’t post the recipe here because I didn’t change a darn thing except for doubling it to get 28 muffins (of very varying and not at all uniform sizes, oops), and forgetting the nuts, because if I didn’t forget at least one ingredient while baking then I wouldn’t be me. At least this time it was only a sprinkling of nuts. So anyway, the point of this was to say that you should click on over to A Thought for Food because she has the recipe, the beautiful, beautiful recipe, and it really is worth the extra click over to a different site. Enjoy!

P.S. these were really good crumbled over that Nutella FroYo I told you about a little while ago. Just sayin’….

P.P.S. Did you know that today is Chocolate & Almonds day? That’s kind of like chocolate & hazelnuts, which is kind of like what this recipe is all about. Would you look at that!