Hazelnut Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I chose these cookies as one of the three cookies I made for my wedding reception because 1. Everyone seems to love nutella 2. they looked straight forward. Let me tell you, these cookie were SO MUCH WORK.

The ingredients are simple, but who knew that in order to use hazelnuts you had to 1. toast the hazelnuts 2. blanche the hazelnuts 3. peel each hazelnut individually! While they are freezing cold because they were just blanched 4. grind the hazelnuts. Mark was literally my savior, and the best sous chef ever and PEELED EACH HAZELNUT. This was incredible.

This cookie behaved strange. See here the first two batches. The cookies looked very different from one another, despite the same oven and the same bake time. I know I used different cookie sheets for each one, so maybe that played a factor? I think I may have used a silicone baking mat on the second batch as opposed to the parchment paper from the first batch, and I have read that baking mats can cause cookies to spread or grease on the bottom. I am going to continue to monitor this in my cookies.

Conclusion: I would not make these cookies again. Although most people enjoyed the cookies, they were way too much work, and most people were disappointed they weren’t just chocolate chip and were unable to identify the other flavor (hazelnut).

These cookies are the chocolate hazelnut cookies from Joanne Chang’s first cookbook Flour.