The Nutella Trials

During our last trip to the store to restock on peanut butter, after staring at the Nutella jars for a good minute my sister and I decided it was time to put into motion my previously mentioned plans.

The original recipe I follow for peanut butter cookies calls for a cup of peanut butter, so I began the trials with about a 1:2 ratio of Nutella to peanut butter.  From this initial attempt I learned three things:  1) that Nutella’s flavor is very potent, 2) that Nutella is not as similar in consistency to peanut butter as it appears to be, and 3) that Nutella cookie dough, when too sticky to bake, is still good to eat.

After the first couple attempts with that batch of dough, I surrendered the remains to my sister, her boyfriend and myself and, lordy it was delicious and addictive.  I figured I’d scrap the Nutella cookie idea and just use the rest of the jar on fruit or maybe crêpes.  But today, while waiting on another beet cake to bake and with two raw egg yokes that needed using, I decided to try again and they came out beautifully:

Unfortunately, I substituted a number of ingredients so there’s probably little chance I could reproduce this result.  For example, the original recipe calls for a cup of sugar, which I didn’t have.  Seeing as this took place after 9pm on a Sunday, by when most of the stores are already closed, I raided the pantry and found about 1/3 cup of regular sugar, 1/3 cup of large-grain unbleached sugar, plus a bag of powdered sugar and some sweetened cocoa powder (both originally purchaced for the beet cake recipe).  Soooooo … I used them all.  Though it’s not unpleasant, the large-grain sugar is noticeable in the finished cookies.  I’d be interested to see how it tastes using just powdered sugar, but that’s an experiment for another time.

For this batch, I only used about a tablespoon of Nutella with the cup (minus a tablespoon) of peanut butter and the dough was much easier to work with.  And since we had a bar of dark chocolate on hand for the beet cake, the fresh-baked cookies got topped with some chocolate shavings.

My only complaint about these is that they are so rich, you need a glass of milk to go with them.  Now to test them on the Chileans and commence the conversion.