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.