Baking with Nutella

Nutella is a spread that is made primarily of sugar and hazelnuts.  It has been popular in Europe for decades but it somehow has never gotten a serious foothold in America.  It's possible that our love of peanuts and relative indifference toward hazelnuts has prevented Nutella from getting a larger market share. Or it may be that spreading Nutella on a piece of bread is more like spreading frosting than spreading peanut butter.

In any case, we recently purchased a 2-pack of Nutella at Costco and had enjoyed spreading on toasted bred and English muffins when I got the bright idea to make Nutella cookies.  For a recipe I first looked at the Nutella website www.nutellausa.com.  They were not helpful.  Their idea of using Nutella in a recipe was "spread Nutella on your favorite bakery product".  Talk about reinforcing the "frosting" image.

I had more luck Googling "Nutella cookies".  

I selected a recipe called Nutella Oatmeal Cookies from dogismysouschef.blogspot.com .  I doubled the recipe, reduced the sugar, and added a cup of chocolate chips.  As I placed the scooped balls of dough on the cookie sheet it looked like I might have a winner.

Ten minutes later as I removed the baked cookies from the oven, I was disappointed.  So disappointed that I'm not going to be citing the recipe here at this time.  Maybe after I get it "fixed".  As up can see, the cookies spread out as far as they could almost making one big cookie.  That also made them as thin as could be so they were more like wafers than cookies.  The taste was yummy which somewhat offset the fact that they also fell to pieces if they were only slightly warm.  When cool they were easily broken.