The other day I felt like making something easy and simple. I am tired of making desserts that take hours to make. So I decided to make Nutella stuffed cookies.
I LOVED THESE.
They were so soft and gooey but also a little crispy on the outside, they were so good!
Video Tutorial
The Nutella
The first thing we are going to do is freeze our Nutella.
By the way, you of course don’t have to use Nutella. You could use other spreads like peanut butter, Biscoff spread…I’ve ran out of spreads. But most things work.
But Nutella is my favourite, so this is what I used.
To freeze it, we’re just going to add dollops onto a tray and put this in the freezer. We want these to be fully set before stuffing the cookies with them, it will just make things easier.
Also I know you might be tempted to do huge dollops of Nutella, keep them on the smaller side.
The cookies will just fall apart if you stuff them with too much Nutella, so don’t make the dollops too big.
Ingredients for the cookie dough
Here are the ingredients you are going to need to make the cookie dough:
- Unsalted butter – I always like to use unsalted butter, so that I can control the amount of salt in the recipe, but salted butter does work too. Just don’t add any extra salt.
- Sugar – I used a mixture of white and brown sugar. The white sugar adds crispiness. The brown sugar adds moisture and flavour.
- Vanilla – for flavour.
- Eggs – I used 1 whole egg and also an egg yolk for these cookies. The extra egg yolk adds extra moisture, which gives the cookies a softer gooier centre.
- Plain flour – also known as all purpose flour.
- Corn flour – also known as corn starch. This is also going to help give a gooey centre, and it also helps prevent the cookies from spreading too much.
- Baking powder – to keep the cookies thick.
- Salt – to enhance the flavours. If you are using salted butter, don’t add this.
- Chocolate – I chopped up actual chocolate and added this into my cookie dough. Chocolate chips work too, just use whichever you prefer. Also I used dark chocolate but again use whatever you prefer.
Using cold butter instead of softened or melted
In the recipe card below, I’ve mentioned that you should use cold butter.
This is something that I only started doing recently. I tried it for the first time when I was trying to make Levain bakery style cookies.
Essentially, instead of using softened or melted butter, I creamed the sugar with cold butter instead.
I’ve learnt, from TikTok, that this helps give you thicker cookies.
And it does, it actually does make a difference.
When stuffing cookies with a spread like Nutella, they can tend to be flatter because the Nutella makes the cookies spread a little more.
So I wanted to make a cookie dough that spreads less. Using cold butter helps.
With all that being said. I used a stand mixer. If you don’t have a stand mixer or an electric hand mixer, it is probably better to just use softened butter.
Trying to cream the cold butter and sugar together by hand, will be very difficult.
So just use softened butter. Cold butter does make a difference, but the difference is not huge. The cookies will still be great with softened butter!
Freezing the cookie dough balls
Once the cookie dough was made. I divided the dough into 140g pieces.
I got one piece, flattened it and added a piece of frozen Nutella into the centre.
Then I just rolled it into a ball, making sure that the Nutella was fully covered.
Once you have done this with all of your cookie dough, you want to leave these cookie dough balls to chill in your freezer for about an hour.
THIS IS IMPORTANT DON’T SKIP THIS.
If you don’t chill them before baking, they will just spread way too much in the oven. And you’ll end up with extremely flat cookies.
So make sure to chill them!
Baking the cookies
Typically cookies are baked at 180c. I actually baked these at 220c instead.
This is much hotter than usual, but just trust me on this, it works.
This higher temperature allows the outside of the cookies to cook faster which does two things:
- It stops them from spreading too much.
- But most importantly. it gives you a nice crispy outside and a gooey centre.
Making the cookies ahead of time
I just wanted to mention, this recipe makes around 6 big cookies.
If you didn’t want to bake them all at once, you don’t have to.
Instead, you can put the cookie dough balls into a food bag, then leave them in your freezer, they will last in there for about 3 months.
Then whenever you want cookies, pre-heat your oven, then bake the cookie straight out of the freezer!
Here are a few other cookie recipes I think you should try:
Nutella
Stuffed Cookies
Ingredients
Makes: 6
A jar of Nutella
120g unsalted butter, cold
100g brown sugar
100g granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
280g plain flour
2 tablespoons corn flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
200g chocolate, chopped
Directions
- Start by adding 6 small dollops of Nutella onto a baking paper lined tray. You can either use a spoon to do this, or put the Nutella into a piping bag and pipe the dollops.
- Leave this in your freezer so that the Nutella can fully freeze.
- In a large bowl, add the butter, both sugars and vanilla. Beat these together for 5 minutes.
- Mix the egg and egg yolk into this.
- In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add this into the other bowl, along with the chopped chocolate. Mix everything together until you can no longer see any flour. Your cookie dough might seem crumbly, this is good, we want it to be like this.
- Divide this dough into 140g pieces. You should get 6 or 7 pieces.
- Get one of the cookie dough pieces, flatten it out, then add one piece of the frozen Nutella into the centre. Roll this into a ball, making sure the Nutella is fully covered.
- Repeat this with the rest of the cookie dough, then place these onto a tray and freeze for an hour.
- About 10 minutes before you're ready to bake them, pre-heat your oven to 220c/425f.
- Place your cookie dough balls on a large baking paper lined tray, making sure to leave gaps between them so they have room to spread.
- Bake the cookies for around 20-22 minutes.
- Once baked, take them out of the oven and leave to cool on the tray for about 15 minutes before trying to pick them up, they will be too soft at first. But then enjoy!
