Chocolate Nutella Cookies

Can you imagine the divine taste of Nutella, all wrapped up in a dark chocolate layer and packaged as a decadent cookie?? If you haven't started salivating already, I'm pretty sure you will, as soon as you lay your hands on these truly delicious Nutella Chocolate Cookies! After devouring endless Nutella crepes in our recent trip to France, I thought it would be great to bake some cookies with Nutella! and of course, there can't be christmas cookies without chocolate, at least for me, so I combined my two favorite ingredients and set forth to bake these decadent Dark Chocolate Nutella Cookies, that are crunchy to eat, and yet melt in your mouth as soon as you start savoring one!

I'm sending these to Susan at Foodblogga for her Eat Christmas Cookies event. Check out all the other delicious entries up here! This also goes to Santa's Holiday Challenge at Tasty Treats, as well as Cookie Baking event over at Neivedyam!

Ingredients
makes 16-18 small cookies
1/4 cup butter
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup semi-sweet dark chocolate chips
3 tbsp Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread
2 tsp finely ground hazelnut powder

Note: I didn't exactly measure my Nutella spread while making these, so I might be a wee bit off in the measurement list. So if you feel your dough is a little soft to handle, just refrigerate it for a couple hours as suggested, and the cookies should turn out fine.

Method
Preheat oven to 350 deg F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and keep aside.

Melt the dark chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl by heating and stirring for 1 minute, in 20-second intervals. Allow it to cool a little.

Beat butter and sugar until creamy, then beat in the Nutella spread. Add the flour, baking powder, salt and stir until combined.

Add the melted dark chocolate and the ground hazelnut powder and mix well.

If the dough looks a bit clumsy to handle, wrap it in a cellophane paper and refrigerate for about 10 mins. This will make it easier to shape into cookies.

Now shape the dough gingerly into small round cookies, or drop them using rounded spoons on the baking sheets, about an inch apart from each other. Press gently with the backside of a fork if you like.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until dark brown in color or until the edges are just set. Let cool on cookie sheets for about 2 minutes. Then remove and cool completely on wire racks.

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