Who's Nuts for Hazelnuts?

I am! I am! Well, actually, my friend A. is but I love them too! 

My friend A. and I get together once every couple of months to cook a feast! How it works is we alternate who hosts and who makes what. One time A. will host and she will make a dessert and I will make the main dish for example. Next time, we alternate. What's great about these cooking days is not only do we do the ol' girl talk with some wine but it also give us the opportunity to make a dish that we find either intimidating or complicated and we have the help from the other person to tackle the challenge.

A couple weekends ago, we decided to conquer a few dishes that have been on our radar; I picked the main meal option and she picked a dessert. I wanted to make a play on a chicken pot pie from my Southern Vegetarian cookbook while she opted for hazelnut cupcakes stuffed with a hazelnut moose filling and topped with a chocolate ganache sprinkled with hazelnuts. This is probably time that I should mention that her husband (who was out of town at the time) is deathly allergic to nuts, so it's very rare that she can add nuts to recipes. Did I also mention that this entire meal was vegan? 

For this post, we will focus on dessert:

This was a recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World! You can view the recipe here. 

We had fun tracking down a few obscure ingredients including hazelnut liqueur, hazelnut meal, hazelnuts, hazelnut extract and espresso powder. We didn't have any luck with the hazelnut liqueur but we found the rest of these ingredients at Scoop n' Weigh on Taylor. It is a little more expensive but the only other place that had the hazelnuts and hazelnut meal was Bulk Barn. They didn't have the extract and I couldn't think of anywhere else where they would have it. We replaced the liqueur with extract.

This was definitely a hazelnut heavy dessert but the cupcake was moist, and the moose creamy which was definitely chocolate-y and rich but also had a nice espresso kick. Finally, the chocolate ganache topping just tied everything together with the chopped hazelnuts sprinkled over it.