Nutella Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients:

I love peanut butter cookies, I love Nutella, and I was having trouble coming up with any other decent ideas for cookies so I decided to go with it. There's a lot of variety in peanut butter cookie recipes and end results, so if you decide to try this you can use your favorite. I perfer the light and almost flaky style over the chewier chocolate chip cookie style, so I used a recipe that I knew would give me the results I desired (Alton Brown's, in this case.) I generally weigh all my ingredients when baking, but I'll provide volumetric measurements for those of you who are scale impaired.


Ingredients:

170g/0.75 cup unsalted butter, softened
142g/0.75 cup granulated sugar
142/0.875 (7/8) cup brown sugar
39g/0.25 cup peanut or canola oil
142g/0.5 cup + 1 tsp chunky peanut butter
142g/0.5 cup + 1 tsp Nutella
75g/scant 2 large beaten eggs*
4.5g/1 tsp vanilla extract
255g/1.875 (1 7/8) cup all purpose flour
3g/1.5 tsp baking soda
4.5g/0.75 tsp salt
Some extra granulated sugar for sprinkling on tops of cookies.


* The full recipe makes 6 dozen cookies, but my roommate and I don't need 6 dozen cookies sitting around so I always make a half batch. Everything else divides evenly except the eggs. The full batch calls for 3 large eggs, so if you used 2 medium eggs you could probably get really close. But we always have large eggs in the fridge, so I just use those and measure off around 75g.

And of course, you'll need the following equipment: A mixer of some sort or some elbow grease, cookie sheets, a fork, measuring cups and spoons, work bowls, a spoon or other utensil for dishing out the cookies, and a cooling rack.

Step 1:

Measure out your flour, baking soda, and salt and combine them.

Step 2:

Next, beat your eggs and measure to get the appropriate amount. Then add the vanilla extract.

Step 3:

Next measure the butter. If you're like me and didn't have time to let it soften properly, cut into small chunks and microwave on low for 30 seconds or so.

Step 4:

Measure out the oil at this time as well.

Step 5:

Now it's time to measure out the key ingredients for this recipe: the sugars and the peanut butter and Nutella.

Step 6:

Measure out the brown suagr.

Step 7:

Measure out the peanut butter and Nutella.

Step 8:

Mix the butter by itself for about a minute to get it spread around the bowl, then add the sugars and cream together at medium speed until the mixure lightens.

Step 9:

Reduce speed to low and add the oil and peanut butter next and mix for another two minutes on medium to get everything well combined. Reduce speed to low once again and add the egg/vanilla extract mixture, scraping down the side of the bowl as necessary. Finally add the flour mixture in increments, again scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.

Step 10:

When finished, you should have a dough that looks like this:

Now, place the dough in the refrigerator for a half hour. During this time you can clean up the mess you've probably made on your counter tops, and prepare your cookie pans. Greasing them should work fine, but I usually use parchment paper because a) I can move a whole pan to the cooling rack at a time and b) makes for very easy cleanup.

Step 11:

After the 30 minutes is up, first preheat the oven to 350F. Then remove the dough from the refrigerator and resist the temptation to grab your dishing spoon and dig in like it was a pint of Ben & Jerry's and you've just broken up with your boy/girlfriend.

Step 12:

Spoon approximately golf ball sized balls of dough onto your cookie sheets, use your fork to press down the cookies and impart them with the traditional criss-cross pattern, and sprinkle the tops with a little sugar. The end result should look like this.

Step 13:

Place the cookies in the oven and bake for 17-20 minutes or until the cookies are lightly browned around the edges. When you remove them to cool they should look like this.

Repeat the shaping/baking process with remaining dough. The halved recipe should have yielded 3 dozen cookies, but mine were a bit on the small side so I ended up with not quite 4 dozen.

Finally, once the cookies have cooled, enjoy a few with an optional glass of ice cold milk. Actually, forego the milk for the first cookie so you can get a feel for how the Nutella has altered the taste. It's not a huge change, but it is noticable. You still taste the peanut butter, but now there's hazelnut and chocoalte there as well. One idea I had that I unfortunately didn't have time to try was to melt some chocolate, pour it into the criss-cross grooves and letting it harden.

Anyways, I hope you all enjoyed this recipe. It's nothing fancy, but are they tasty.