Nutella Chip Cookies

This week, Baked Sunday Mornings is baking Nutella chip cookies from Baked Occasions. I love Nutella. I don't remember when I discovered the joys of smothering everything in Nutella - I suppose it probably was in college. Since then, I've learned to keep Nutella out of my cupboard, because otherwise it winds up on toast, oatmeal, pancakes, waffles, vanilla ice cream, pretzel rolls, in ebelskivers, and of course, by itself on a spoon. At one point last year, I was trying to purge the Nutella jars (yes, it comes as a two-pack) I'd bought at Costco from my cupboard and decided the obvious thing to do was bake with Nutella. So I made Nigella Lawson's Nutella brownies. They were fast and easy to make, friends said they were delicious, but I was not a fan. To me, the Nutella was diminished by being baked into brownies, not elevated or even turned into something equally as good. I would have preferred eating it on a spoon. I have a similar opinion about these Nutella chip cookies.Making these cookies was a cake walk, especially compared with some of the more recent cookies we've made at Baked Sunday Mornings. They use a typical cookie dough method: beat butter, add sugar (and Nutella) and continuing creaming, add egg and vanilla, add dry ingredients (in two parts), fold in chocolate chips and chopped hazelnuts. Let the dough rest in the fridge for at least 4 hours, then portion and bake.

I thought the dough was delicious and full of the sweet chocolate-hazelnut flavor I love from Nutella, but once baked the Nutella flavor became so muted that no one knew they were eating a Nutella-laced cookie until I told them so. In fairness, I did leave out the toasted and coarsely chopped hazelnuts, because I don't like nuts in my cookies and because hazelnuts are so expensive I didn't have any in the house when I made these. Maybe if I had had the chopped hazelnuts in there, these cookies would have tasted a lot more like a Nutella cookie instead of just a soft, rather forgettable, chocolate cookie with chocolate chips. Or maybe I should have chilled the dough for even longer, up to the maximum 48 hours, thus giving the Nutella long enough to marry with the other ingredients and transform into a deeply addictive Nutella cookie. I'm not sure. This is a shockingly short post (for me, anyway). I guess it's obvious that I wasn't a huge fan. There are so many cookies I like from Baked Occasions that I doubt I'll find myself making these again. But maybe that's just me! Head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of these.