Salted Nutella Brownies

Let’s all pretend bathing suit season isn’t right around the corner, and indulge in some Salted Nutella Brownies this weekend.

I recently hosted an event that, long story short, left me with two MASSIVE Costco-sized jars of Nutella sitting in my kitchen, staring me in the face every day.  On Day 1, this is a pretty cool thing — “Look at all the Nutelllaaaaaaaa!”, but by Day 25, you start wondering how much Nutella you’ve actually eaten, and was it really necessary to add a dollop to your morning smoothie ( Hint: It wasn’t. )

I needed a game plan to get rid of all of it, so I defaulted to the best way I know how to get rid of food: take it into the office.

Now, I probably could have brought the random jars into the office and seen them quickly disappear, but I also wanted to use the opportunity to experiment a little.

In my experience, the things people love the best in group settings are items that can be picked up and walked off with.  Brownies perfectly fit this bill.  Since I had roughly a billion cups of Nutella to work with, I figured I’d just skip the cocoa powder and slap some Nutella into my brownie recipe.  That didn’t work out so well the first time, but never fear! I persisted and it payed off.

I played around with the cooking time a lot on this recipe, and finally came to the conclusion that you’re just going to have to decide what kind of brownie you want, because I made them fudgy and I made them cakey, and I really thought they were both excellent.  The brownies in the pictures are with the longer, “cakey” cooking time, in case you are looking for a direct replica!