One Bowl Easy Nutella Cupcakes (Secretly Vegan!)

These are my absolute favorite Nutella cupcakes! Filled with a creamy chocolate hazelnut spread within the most rich and tender chocolate cupcake, these Nutella cupcakes are also secretly vegan and gluten free! You won’t even notice!

Why you’ll love these vegan cupcakes (even if you’re not vegan!)

So you might be wondering…can these Nutella cupcakes actually taste amazing despite the title?

Yes, these Nutella cupcakes are indeed vegan, which means they’re both eggless and dairy free. And they just so happen to be gluten free as well. But before you click away from this recipe, let me tell you why this shouldn’t make you hesitate.

You see, I’ve been at this vegan baking game for a while, and most of my taste testers are indeed not vegan. This means that they too once held the beliefs that vegan desserts are tasteless, impossible to compare to the classics, and just “gross.” But their jaws dropped to the floor with these Nutella cupcakes.

They even thought I might have “changed my ways” and made a more conventional recipe ha! You won’t believe how absolutely moist, rich, and decadent these Nutella cupcakes are.

And yet they’re dairy free and eggless! Now, real Nutella is not vegan nor dairy free, but we’re actually using a dairy free chocolate hazelnut spread that I kid you not is just as delicious and easy to devour by the spoonfuls!

Trust me, you’re just going to love these Nutella cupcakes! This will be your new go to recipe!

How to make the best Nutella cupcakes

Now for the fun part: actually making this Nutella cupcake recipe!

As with all of my recipes, the full ingredient measurements and instructions are found down below in the recipe card. However, let’s go over the basics!

For these easy Nutella cupcakes, you’ll need:

• Oat flour: if you don’t need these Nutella cupcakes to be gluten free as well, you can see the recipe swaps down below! However, oat flour is such an easy flour to even make from scratch. You won’t even be able to tell that these cupcakes are gluten free!
• Arrowroot powder: this helps to achieve a really tender and light crumb texture to the cupcakes.
• Coconut sugar: you can also use granulated sugar here if you don’t need these cupcakes to be refined sugar free!
• Cacao powder: I personally prefer cacao powder over cocoa powder, as it’s much richer in taste.
• Dairy free milk: my favorite to use is oat milk or coconut milk are!
• Vegan Butter: see my swaps below in the substitutions section.
• Applesauce: this replaces eggs in a standard Nutella cupcake recipe!
• Vegan Nutella or chocolate hazelnut spread

Once you’ve gathered your ingredients, we’ll make the cupcakes!

The batter is super easy to make. You’ll whisk together the dry ingredients, and then gently fold in the wet. You can use a hand mixer or simply a rubber spatula.

Just be careful not to over mix the batter! Then fill each cupcake liner nearly to the top. Because we’re using oat flour, the cupcakes won’t rise as much!

Once baked, we’ll allow the cupcakes to fully cool before we fill them with Nutella!

How to fill Nutella cupcakes

Filling cupcakes is actually quite an easy process, and actually, one of my really close blogging friends, Camila from Pies & Tacos, has an entire cookbook on how to make fantastic filled cupcakes!

To create a fillable cupcake, you can use a spoon or a cupcake corer. You can absolutely get by with just a spoon. We’ll be frosting the top of the cupcake anyways, so you won’t notice any flaws in your cupcake!

I do like using a cupcake corer, though, as it gets the job done really fast, when I just want to get to the frosting part!

For the filling, I used my homemade 5-minute vegan Nutella recipe, but store bought is also fine. There is a chocolate hazelnut spread by Rigioni d’Asagio that I absolutely love.

I fill each cupcake with about a teaspoon of spread and place a piece of the cupcake back on top to prevent the buttercream from sinking in.

Then you’re ready to frost!

The best vegan chocolate buttercream

This is hands down my favorite vegan chocolate buttercream frosting. My mom keeps saying she could just eat a bowl of it herself ha!

It’s super simple to make, and honestly not that different from making an American chocolate buttercream, if you’re more familiar with conventional baking.

As I mentioned above, the full recipe is found down below in the recipe card!

I like to sprinkle each cupcake with chopped and toasted hazelnuts as well. It adds a really lovely “crunch” to the cupcakes, and gives you even more hazelnut aroma and flavor.

Substitutions & Swaps

Oat flour. If you want to make these gluten free vegan Nutella cupcakes, but don’t use oat flour, you can also use your favorite gluten-free 1:1 baking flour, such as King Arthur Flour. If you’re not gluten-free, feel free to swap in all-purpose flour!

Vegan butter. You can also use coconut oil in place of vegan butter for the actual cupcakes. However, for the vegan buttercream frosting, please stick with using vegan butter!

Applesauce. Many plant based bakers like to use ground flaxseed with water, or a flaxseed “egg,” as their egg replacement. You can use this, but I highly recommend you stick with the applesauce! Using applesauce locks in more moisture than flaxseed, which yields the perfect crumb.

Chocolate hazelnut spread. Maybe you want to make these, but a loved one or even you might be nut free! To make these cupcakes entirely nut-free and have them be No-Nut-ella cupcakes (LOL you like my pun?!), you can use a chocolate sunflower seed butter or a chocolate coconut butter instead! For the remaining ingredients, just make sure that all of your dairy free ingredients are nut-free.

Final Nutella cupcake tips & tricks

Make sure all wet ingredients are room temperature. This makes for a much better bake. And there’s actually a scientific reason as to why. But for our purposes, just know that the room temperature ingredients help everything to bind much easier in the oven and yield a fluffy and lighter cupcake!

Wait until the cupcakes are completely cool to core and frost them. Not only will allowing your cupcakes to fully cool help the frosting not slide onto the table, but it’ll also be easier to core the cupcakes.

Cool the cupcakes for 10 minutes in the tin. This helps the cupcake liners peel off the Nutella cupcakes much more easily.

Use any dairy free milk that you’d like. I personally prefer coconut milk or oat milk here!

If you don’t want refined sugar free: this recipe also works with granulated sugar, but I will say that the cupcakes themselves taste so much richer with coconut sugar!

I hope you absolutely love this easy Nutella cupcake recipe as much as I do! If you make these cupcakes, be sure to leave a comment down below, as well as a rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ so that others may find it!

As always, I absolutely love to see your beautiful creations on Instagram and Pinterest, so be sure to tag me there!

Happy cupcake filling!

More vegan Nutella recipes:

Vegan Nutella Stuffed Cookie Brownie Bars

Vegan Chocolate Hazelnut Cake

Homemade Vegan Nutella

Vegan Nutella Bread Wreath

Chocolate Hazelnut No Bake Energy Bites

Want to save this recipe for later? Add it to your favorite recipe board on Pinterest!

Print