world nutella day: nutella cookies

I'm a day late. So sad, but yesterday was World Nutella Day! Of course I had to bake with nutella. So jwoo has two big bottles/jars of nutella and being the nice person I am, I am helping him finish it. :]
This was my first time making Nutella cookies and they turned out well... nice and soft and chewy.
Yum, yum dough. This only made 30 cookies.
They spread out a lot and look pretty perfectly round. Yays.

Here's the recipe!

Ingredients:

½ cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
½ cup Nutella or other hazelnut chocolate spread
1 egg
½ tsp. Frangelico (if you have it, if not vanilla will work just fine)
1 ½ cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
1/3 cup mini chocolate chips (I used white chocolate chips and added almonds)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F.

Cream butter with an electric mixer about 1 minute until smooth. Add in both sugars. Beat on high speed about 3 minutes until light & fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

With the mixer on low, add the egg and Frangelico (or vanilla). Then add the Nutella and mix well.

In a small bowl whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients, and mix on low speed until incorporated. Increase the speed to medium and mix just until the dough is smooth. Fold in chocolate chips.

Using a small ice cream scoop (or a teaspoon) form the dough into balls and place on greased cookie sheet. To prevent my cookies from spreading too much, I stuck the cookie sheets in the fridge for about 10 minutes before baking, but probably freezer is more effective.

Bake 6-7 minutes (or 7-8 if baking from freezer). Let cookies cool about 5 minutes and transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Nutella cookies courtesy of Erin's Food Files

tea and crumpets!

For my friends birthday, she had a tea and crumpet and Pride and Prejudice party. Why, what are tea and crumpets? I had no idea... Haha, nevertheless what a perfect opportunity to bake! For some reason I had this idea that crumpets were small cute dessert things and I've been dying for another opportunity to use my mini muffin tins. So I made bakewell tarts...or the closest I could get them.

I actually forgot which site I got the recipe from...but I kinda adapted from several. Also a big difference was that I used puff pastry instead of making my own dough. Yes lazyness also wins...plus I had some in the fridge.

So I didn't know what to put it in...I think normally they have fruity things so I made blueberry jam. I basically heated up brown sugar and when it was mostly melted, I dumped my thawed blueberries in. I cooked that until the blueberries were almost no more and it was thick. Half of the tarts had blueberry and the other half had nutella. I topped the ones with nutella with sliced almonds. I forgot to take pictures of the process once again... but I took pictures of the results.

Nutella filled tart.

Inside nutella filled tart

Inside blueberry jam filled tart

My little platter of goodies :)

To end, in the words of Mr. Darcy: I love you....most ardently. [only for Tammaymay]

-n