The Cupcake Chronicles: Nuts for Nutella

In this next installment of the Nutella-holics series I bring you with great joy the Nutella filled cookie. That's right. Its a chocolate overload that you won't be able to stop munching on. Especially when they're fresh out of the oven. Which is how half my batch disappeared within half an hour of making them. There really isn't much more that I can say aside from GO MAKE THESE ASAP. Enjoy!

Chocolate Nutella Filled Cookies
1 cup butter (room temp, will be much easier to cream with sugar this way)
1¼ cup sugar
2 large eggs
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2¼ cups all-purpose flour
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1½ cups large semi-sweet chocolate chips
Nutella for filling (have a backup jar, I used way more than expected)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

First off, according to the original recipe, you're supposed to use a mixer to cream everything together but with a lot of fast whisking and enlisting help from my taste testers' mixing arms I managed to do just fine without one and yield the same results.

So, first cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy. Mix in eggs slowly and once those are incorporated and fluffy, slowly (and I mean slowly) mix in the cocoa powder. If you whip it around too fast you'll be fortunate enough to get a burst of cocoa powder to the face, which I did.

Next mix in the flour, salt and baking powder and once its blended add the chocolate chips. At this point it's going to be hard to mix by hand so put some muscle into it, don't be lazy or not all your cookies will have chocolate chips in them.

Now, here comes the delicious Nutella part. There are two ways to put the cookies together and I found the original version to be much easier. One way is to take about 2 tablespoons in your hand and flatten it out then put a small dollop of Nutella in the center, then take the edges and fold them up and pinch them together to create a little capsule and place on a prepared baking sheet. This way worked best for me, and just to avoid getting the dough stuck to my hands I rubbed some flour into my hands every once in a while.

The other way is to take about 1 tablespoon of the dough and flatten it, then put the Nutella on top and place another piece of dough on top and pinch the sides together. I found this to be kind of messy when the Nutella would ooze out the sides, but your choice.

Once you've got all your Nutella filled cookies set out (giving them about at least an inch or two between each other to spread out, stick them in the oven for about 13-16 minutes, though no more than that or else they wont be gooey inside.