Greetings, Minions! Valentine’s Day is coming, so by law, I am required to give you something heart shaped or else the goons at Hallmark will use my dough hook to gouge out my kneecaps. Since the internet loves Nutella almost as much as it does bacon, I’ve conjured a recipe for Nutella (or cinnamon) stuffed heart shaped rolls. If you’re broke and have a little free time, these are a great substitute for buying chocolate. After all, you’ve probably already got flour and eggs at home. You can get some Nutella for around $3 and a box of Red Velvet cake mix for another $2. Remember, in romance just as in evil, creativity trumps overspending.
Nutella Stuffed Red Velvet Hearts
BREAD:
1 cup warm water
1 tbsp yeast
¼ cup sugar (1/2 cup if you like your rolls sweeter)
½ tsp salt
1 egg
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 box Red Velvet cake mix
1 tsp red food coloring
2 cups flour
FILLING:
2 tbsp melted butter
1/2 cup Nutella
– OR
2 tbsp melted butter
⅓ cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
OPTIONAL:
8 slices crispy bacon
Start by mixing your yeast, water, and sugar. After ten minutes, your yeast should be celebrating their unexpected reanimation by throwing quite the bubbly party.
Add the sugar, salt, egg, oil, and food coloring, and give it a good stir.
Now add your sugar, flour, and box of Red Velvet Cake mix.
Knead the dough in a stand mixer for 6 minutes or by hand for 6-10. You want a pretty firm ball here, with about the same feel as challah dough.
Let the dough rise for about an hour, or until it doubles in size.
Punch the dough down. Spread out some flour to keep it from sticking then roll it into a rectangle. Slice your rectangle in half. Otherwise, much like your real heart after a good valentine’s day meal, your rolls will be so oversaturated with fattening fillings they’ll lose shape and threaten to explode.
Since I was making two types of rolls, I spread the left side with a nice layer of Nutella.
If you’re adding bacon, spread it in a nice, even layer, lengthwise, at the furthest edges. You don’t want a whole strip of bacon in each bite. Instead, let the salty goodness give it a subtle, meaty crunch.
To create a heart shape, start by gently but firmly folding the edges inwards. You want to roll both sides towards the middle, keeping both sides roughly the same size.
Once you’ve achieved two linked tubes, cut off the scrap at one end. Now make neat, 2 inch slices.
Making these otherwise round things heart shaped isn’t that tricky. Pick each slice up by the top, at the most rounded part of the heart. Now pinch the bottom, where you want your heart to have a point.
You should end up with something that looks like this. As you can see, if you’d over-stuffed the hearts, the round upper parts would be too big and the pointy bottom would look like a confusing vestigial tail.
Instead, you want rolls that resemble a happy vagina with symbolic fallopian tubes inside. After all, Valentine’s Day is all about the lovin’.
Let your symbolic yet tasty lady parts rise for another half an hour. Right before baking, re-pinch the pointy ends to help the rolls keep their shape.
Bake the rolls for 15-17 minutes. You want to pull them out before they turn golden brown. We can pretend that’s so the filling stays moister, but really, it’s because red dough with a brown crust looks like it has some kind of unfortunate infection.
When they come out of the oven they look like full, lovely…agh! What happened in there?
Wait. Calm down. That’s just what Nutella does when it bakes. Your hearts didn’t pick up a crusty infection from the oven’s warm affection. (If you add bacon, these look even more bizarrely horrific.)
While what just happened in the oven is perfectly natural, we are going to hide the evidence under a layer of more Nutella.
Much better.
Remember the other half of your dough?
I don’t really recommend turning it into cinnamon sugar filled rolls instead of Nutella filled ones. Basically, here’s what happens after you slather the dough in butter and cover that in cinnamon and brown sugar.
Instead of the lovely lady parts achieved by the Nutella rolls, the butter and cinnamon ones end up disturbingly crunchy. For some reason, they also don’t inflate as much. I let them rise for a full hour and they never filled out as much as the Nutella ones did. The butter also made it a lot harder to get these suckers to stick together.
I think these came out looking more like a close-up nostril shot of an angry Star Trek alien.
However, they puffed up okay once baked at 350F for 15 minutes. As a ring, they’re actually kind of pretty. Individual, they’re crusty alien noses. That may come in hand some day, though.
To pretty them up, make a basic icing from 1/4 cup melted butter, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 cup water and copious amounts of red food coloring. Carefully move the whole ring to a serving plate, paint them up with extra sugary icing goodness, and try not to hold one up in front of your nose while making snorting noises. I failed at this last part, but maybe you’re a stronger person than I. Or, y’know, just coat them with more Nutella.