Candied-Hazelnut Cupcakes (MSC)
This is my first official Martha Stewart Cupcake Club post. Every month someone picks a cupcake form Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes and we all bake and post it. Jeannette at The Whimsical Cupcake picked Martha’s Candied-Hazelnut Cupcakes from page 284. You can find the recipe here, but if you buy the book you will have all 175 “inspired ideas.” I was glad that these cupcakes came up because I actually don’t know if I would have ever made them because I am not a huge nut fan. I agree with those that said that these were time-consuming. They sure were! My husband plans to take these with him to school tomorrow for a faculty breakfast. I think they are a good breakfast cupcake! So, here is what the batter looked like.
I must admit that I did not read the directions carefully enough! Anybody else do what I did? I read the Candied-Hazelnut recipe and it said it made 24 cucpakes, but then you have to go to the Almond-Hazelnut cupcake recipe, which only makes 16! If you follow the recipe on the internet it tells you it makes 16. So, I made 24 and that is why, as you can see,  some of my cucpakes are tiny! As I was doing this I thought… I must be doing something wrong… Oh well!
The candied hazelnuts were also not easy! It took forever for me to get the right consistency for me to easily dip and remove each hazelnut. In the end I got most of them to work…. a few ended up stuck in the caramel. Here’s what they looked like when they were dripping off the side of my counter.
This was also pretty messy… the strings of caramel were sticky and moving around quite a bit. When I broke them off I Â couldn’t get them to be all the same size and they weren’t all straight, but that’s okay! So, here is a few of them all assembled.
I had a lot of little pieces of caramel strings that ended up on the wax paper I layed down… When I looked at it I thought hmmm… that looks like Martha’s Spun-Sugar cupcakes. So, I figured I’d place some of that on one cupcake as a teaser for those… I am not sure that I will be making those anytime soon because they also look like a lot of work!
Today was a crazy baking day. I also made some great Pi Day treats today too, but you’ll have to stop by on March 14 to see those!
Very nice. I am going to be doing mine a little different will be posting them later. Kudos to you for conquering the candied hazelnuts :)
@Tanisha, Thanks! I’ll keep a look-out for yours. My husband brought these to school today and it seems that people were not big fans of the candied hazelnuts (or at least were scared of them). He ended up bringing some of those back :-)
Yours look great! Kudos to you for taking the candied hazelnut challenge! I love the spun sugar topper. I had the same thought, although I just put little haystacks of sugar on my kids’ dinner plates. They were like, “Wow! Mom’s letting us eat sugar for dinner!” :-)
@Simple Girl, Thanks! I am going to check your out right now… I can imagine how great a pile of sugar is for dinner. Awesome!
They look awesome!! Love what you did with the extra sugar :)
@Holly, Thanks Holly! I didn’t want to waste all that sugary-goodness!
I also liked the sugar effect, but ate it, rather than topping a cake with it.
@Lisa, I definitely ate some of it too. It was hard to eat, but tasted good!
Very nice!! I will have to try this technique… just wasn’t able to last month.