So many cookies. I can’t stop. I won’t stop.
I think I ate more sugar than I did anything else this weekend. Saturday morning I tried to perfect a recipe for the cookbook, only to end up with cookies that were hard as rocks and dry as…sand? Or something else really dry? The point = gross. Later that day I completely changed the recipe and tried again. I peeked in on the cookies while baking, and they looked FABULOUS – puffy, chewy, perfect little rounds. Time played a cruel joke on me 2 minutes later when I took them out of the oven and saw completely flat, bubbly, burnt-edge blobs. Nope.
Since I had spent the day eating ill-fated dough and cookies, that night I coped by making a pan of my very favorite fudge brownies. It’s a cookbook recipe that I have made 4 times already, because it’s that good. It’s healthy(ish), but it’s still a dessert, so it worked well with my sugar-themed weekend.
Sunday I woke up and finally found some recipe-testing success. I based these beauties off of my ginger cookies, but I switched up the spices a bit, swapped molasses out for maple syrup, and instead of all white sugar I used a mix of white and dark brown. They’re buttery, chewy, and would be perfect if I just left them alone, but obviously I didn’t.
Right after I took them out of the oven, I used a muddler to press little circular dents into the top of each puffy cookie. Sure, you could use your thumb considering these are “thumbprint” cookies, but maybe you’re obsessed with uniformity and can’t handle an asymmetrical dent in the top of your circular cookies because it just looks so WRONG…I wouldn’t know anything about that though, cause that’s totally crazy. Yeah.
Aaaaanyway, into that dent went either Nutella and sea salt or silky melted dark chocolate. The Nutella-filled cookies could be over-the-top sweet, but the hint of sea salt results in the perfect sweet-yet-salty flavor combo. The super dark chocolate gives the sugary cookie a little bitter edge, which is great if you’re into that sort of thing. Note: I’m totally into that sort of thing.
I tried to decide which filling to present you with, I really did. I kept taking bites out of different cookies (research, you know), and eventually I ended up combining the two. Then I realized I needed to put the cookies down, step away, and let you decide which version you want to make.
The Nutella won’t really firm up, but the chocolate filling will harden in an hour or so. If you bite into the dark chocolate filling before it’s set, you’ll get chocolate drizzle all up in everything. Maybe that’s your goal, but I just felt I should warn you.
After I baked these cookies I went to my parent’s house for our annual family Christmas cookie baking extravaganza and assembled Bon Bon cookies for 2 hours.
Someone hand me a salad.
Soft, chewy spice cookies sweetened with maple syrup, and filled with your choice of Nutella and sea salt or smooth dark chocolate.
Yield: 32 cookies
Prep Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
Cook Time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes