Ferrero Rocher Cupcakes

At last year's holiday dinner for work we did a gift exchange. I didn't like my original gift (it was two kitchen tools I knew I wouldn't use) so I asked to switch. My new gift was a tin of 4 dozen Kirkland Signature-brand chocolate-hazelnut candies (AKA Ferrero Rocher). I took them to Christmas Eve dinner to put them out as one of many offerings for dessert but we only ended up using 1 dozen. The rest sat in their original tin on the floor beneath my kitchen table for almost a year.

Which is why I finally decided to bake with them recently. I focused on cupcakes because I rarely make them (and I randomly bought a cupcake carrier/holder with a coupon at Michael's a while back and had yet to use it). Most of the recipes I found had the candy inside the cupcake but I wasn't sure about doing that (my overthinking brain kept going back to the idea that they'd be too hard to bite into). I finally settled on a recipe from Dixie Crystals (a cane sugar company) that sets the candy on top of the frosting. And since the frosting is Nutella (to go with the chocolate and hazelnut flavors of the candy), I decided to add some Nutella to the cupcake as well, using an idea I found on a food site from the UK.

Sprinkles Biscotti

I'm somewhat in denial.

My little cousin is a college student. After graduating high school last spring, Carly is now a Freshman at Gonzaga. How did this happen?

I swear she was only recently that little girl who sent ME care packages (with Nonni's help) when I was away at Central. I even still have the paper fall wreath she made me.

Like it or not, it's now her turn to be away for school. So of course I had to send her a care package. Right away I knew I wanted to send her some cookies like my mom used to send me. Obviously the cookies had to have sprinkles in them. This is where my 24/7 Food Network-watching came in handy: one of the network's newer stars is a food blogger and cook named Molly Yeh and she's just as obsessed with sprinkles as Carly is. She even made Sprinkles Biscotti in an episode of her show Girl Meets Farm, something I immediately decided to eventually make for Carly (why not the birthday that followed, I'm not sure). They seem like the kind of cookie that travels well.