Mom of All Trades: Nutella Sea Salt Stuffies and Lessons Learned

I was destined to make these cookies this week. First, the good folks at King Arthur Flour sent me this awesome recipe in their email newsletter. Next, there were really good Nutella coupons in this week's inserts.

Buy One Get One Free, doesn't get any better than this!

Then, Meijer has Nutella on sale this week (through 2/12/14).

...and since I don't own a 7 lb tub of Nutella like my friend Isabelle (check out her photo HERE along with another Nutella recipe), I decided to go stock up.

Now onto the recipe...

Nutella Sea Salt Stuffies

original recipe HERE

Filling

1/2 cup Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread

Cookie dough

1 cup Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread

1 cup flour

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon espresso powder

Topping

coarse sea salt

To make the filling, scoop small balls of Nutella onto a lined baking sheet and freeze for at least 3 hours.

Lesson #1: SMALL BALLS... mine were too big

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all your dough ingredients together.

I decided I didn't want to waste any Nutella by putting it in a measuring cup and then scraping it into a bowl. I decided to measure it out by weight instead and put my whole mixing bowl on a scale, zeroed it, and put in 8 oz of Nutella (that's 1 cup, right? no, I was wrong...)

All the cookie dough ingredients

..."the mixture will be cohesive, fairly soft, but not sticky; think modeling clay"

Well, my mixture was incredibly crumbly. Something wasn't right. I decided to double check the Nutella measurement. One of the things I love about the recipes on the King Arthur Flour website is that you can measure your ingredients by volume, ounces, or grams - all you have to do is click your choice and everything is converted for you. The default is by volume but I changed it to ounces and discovered I needed 10.5 ounces of Nutella.

I put the mixing bowl back on the scale, zeroed it, and added 2.5 more ounces of Nutella.

Adding more Nutella to my dry cookie dough

Lesson #2: 1 cup does not always equal 8 ounces

Scoop your dough into heaping tablespoons.

Filling on top, dough on bottom. This is when I realized my filling balls were too big.

Flatten a ball of cookie dough. Place frozen Nutella ball in the center.

I ended up only using a 1/3 to a 1/4 of each frozen Nutella ball in each cookie.

Wrap dough around Nutella like a dumpling, completely enclosing it. Roll the ball of dough between your palms to seal any cracks and round it out. Place cookies on cookie sheet. Flatten slightly and sprinkle with coarse salt.

Lesson #3: frozen Nutella balls "melt" rather quickly. I had to put the rest back in the freezer to firm back up after just making 9-10 cookies.

Bake cookies for 8-10 minutes. I baked mine for 10 minutes.

Finished cookies. They don't spread much.

This is how much frozen Nutella I had left over.

Admittedly, I probably used far more than half a cup to make these balls.

Cookies can be served warm or at room temperature. Warm cookies will have a melting-center lava-cake like effect. The room temperature cookies will have a more solid center.