Alternate recipe: ignore all the instructions, stick face in Nutella, devour.
Leaving Columbus for a quick Chicago jaunt…which means I’m on a bus with wifi and readers at my mercy. Evil laughter and all that.
These cookies are incredibly simple and good enough to serve as currency (In fact, they’re how I paid for my last bit of couch surfing.)
The vegan variation is less tested than the original, but was successful the last time I tried. I’m sure much of the potential variation comes from different vegan chocolate spreads. I used this one, which is barely sweetened and a little too thick, but worked well otherwise.
– 2 eggs
vegan: two mashed bananas
– 1 cup Nutella….and then lots more for filling. Trust me on this.
vegan: any chocolate spread substitute–there are quite a few
– 1 cup peanut butter
– heaping 1/2 cup sugar
vegan: vegan Nutella substitutes are often less sweet, I’d use 2/3 cup or more.
Preheat oven to 350.
In a mixing bowl, combine all ingredients and mix well. Roll the dough into balls about 2/3 to 3/4 the size of a golf ball. Space widely on an ungreased baking sheet. Unlike the simple peanut butter cookies that this recipe is modeled off, these will spread as they cook, and I put nine to a sheet to compensate.
Press each cookie twice with a fork (run it under cold water between every two balls of dough to prevent sticking), and put the pan in the oven. (If you’re confused by the fork instructions, it should look like this, and you want the cookies to be about 1/2 in thick after you’ve pressed them.)
Bake for about fifteen minutes, or, if you’re me, put them in the oven, forget to set a time, get distracted in conversation for at least ten minutes, spend last five minutes checking them constantly.
Do not remove them from the pan for at least five minutes. They will break, you will be sad, and in your sadness, you will have to eat all the broken cookie pieces. Wait…
After five minutes, transfer them to a cooling rack (or plates, if you don’t have one). The cookies are still fragile, and need to lie flat. Avoid stacking. When the cookies are barely warm to touch, you can make the sandwich part. Spread one tablespoon’s worth of Nutella on the bottom of one cookie, then stick it to the bottom of a second.
Eat.
Repeat.
[If you get impatient and make the cookie sandwiches too early, the Nutella will melt and make a huge mess. You can counteract it a little by sticking them in the fridge or eating them all immediately.]
Anything more complicated than this should be considered the alternate recipe.
Eggs, Nutella, peanut butter, sugar – no flour? Doesn’t this turn out more like fudge?
Either way, sounds delicious!
Nope! The standard peanut butter cookie recipe is one cup sugar, one cup peanut butter, one egg. Flour makes them very crumbly and much less flavorful.
I dunno, Anthony K, not sure I can fit my face in one of those jars! But I’m with you in spirit.
I believe your title should have read “Kate Is Being Awesome”.
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Thanks for providing the recipe! I’ve been looking for more gluten-free cookie options, and these look even more promising than the Nutella lava cupcakes.
You cannot just SAY “Nutella lava cupcakes” and leave us without a recipe!
The basic version is pretty simple:
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1 cup Nutella, room temperature.
2 eggs
10 T flour ( I’ve used both store-bought gluten-free blends and gram flour – based on garbanzo beans; those without gluten intolerance can use wheat flour)
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Blend together the Nutella and the eggs until smooth. Add in the flour, mix until just combined. Evenly spread into a standard 12-cup muffin tin (either use liners or grease and sugar the tin). Bake at 350 F for 12-15 minutes.
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The outer surface should be solid, but the interior will be somewhere between soft and liquid.
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They’re pretty good, but I like sandwich cookies.
What does “10 T flour” mean?
10 Tablespoons, that is, one half cup plus 2 T, which is also 1/2 cup plus 1/8 cup in standard US measurements. Of course, that’s a mess compared to the saner metric measurements.
But flour should be measured by weight, not volume, anyways. It’s between 75-80 grams.
That’s what I get for having learned to cook from US chefs. Translating to metric and rounding to appropriate precision:
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1 cup => 250 ml.
2 eggs => 2 US/Canada large eggs => 2 eggs with mass 60 gm ± 3 gm each.
10 T => 150 ml .
350 F => 175 C
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@hotshoe: I have gotten quite good with multiplying and dividing by factors of two – which is probably why the customary measures have everything scaled by powers of two anyway. But they are sometimes annoying.
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And a caveat to what you said about measuring flour by weight: there sometimes is a reason to measure flours by volume and not weight, given that you haven’t just packed them to drop the porosity or sifted them to raise it. The different flours have different densities – for equal packing and grain size, rice flour is less dense than wheat flour and gram flour is more dense. But that matters less for the cooking than the porosity of the powder as it is added and than the surface area of the grains. Measuring by volume lets me skip adjusting the weights by the density of each particular flour.
The GF bought me the Portal 2 cookie cutter set last Christmas and I have only just got round to making them. They….. are EPIC.
Not decorated yet but I followed the recipe on the decoration card and it came out really well. The intersection of baking and gaming is my happy place.
Hope it’s OK to post a follow-up – image of the completed cookies:
http://pic80.picturetrail.com/VOL2133/2404248/13003380/407426611.jpg
oh my god, everything about these.