Why Isn't Everyone Eating These Decadent and Easy-to-Bake Cookies?

I don’t know why everyone isn’t making these totally decadent, easy, mega-sized cookies with a surprise inside, which can be ready to eat in less than a half-hour from the time you want them — except that maybe I invented them?

The cookies are the size of mini-muffins for a very good reason, but there’s something funny about their bigger-than-normal portions considering they exist because of “portion control.” By that I don’t mean a form of dieting, which would be absurd with these cookies, but that I stumbled into creating them because I’m just not very good at doling out equal amounts of batter onto baking sheets to wind up with uniformly sized cookies.

Related: A Surprising Ingredient Makes These Desserts Irresistible

Because I didn’t know there was such a thing as a cookie scoop (An Oxo scoop is $17 on Amazon), I instead went looking for a thing to instead scoop batter into. Maybe what I really wanted was a silicon cookie mold (which can cost as little as $2 on Amazon), but the closest thing my grocery store had when I was fired up to bake was a mini-muffin tin ($12). And while the simple but solid mini-muffin-sized cookies I made first were good, I couldn’t help but notice that they were big enough to fit something inside. Like Nutella, the delicious spread that makes for a great chocolate filling. Or jelly. Or almost any kind of sugary goo (or candy?) you can imagine.

Related: 20 Essential Baking Tools That Every Aspiring Pastry Chef Needs

I don’t think of myself as a baker. When I experimented, I wanted to make it easy on myself – which is why I just bought some ready-made chocolate chip cookie dough. Your store may stock additional kinds that are ready to use, or very simple mixes such as for peanut butter cookies. In my case, I found dough for around $4 that I could use. (Some of these are safe to eat when raw, but not all.)

Related: Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Brands

Because you don’t need to put a lot of filling in each cookie, you can start your own experimenting with mini-muffin-sized cookies with the smallest container of Nutella or another filling and see how far it goes. The size I bought was $3, and there was plenty left over (maybe for a next batch of cookies).

Related: Nutella Is Just the Start: Fancy Peanut Butters and Other Spreads to Try

Follow the directions on the store-bought dough or rely on your own experience. Preheat your oven – I preheated to 325 degrees – and get on with putting a bit of the dough into each mini-muffin receptacle to make a cup for the Nutella to go in. You don’t have to use a lot of dough: A thin coating in a receptacle will thicken as it bakes, and it’ll all rise. Muffins usually have muffin tops, and the amount of dough you use will decide how much muffin top these cookies get.

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Spoon a bit of Nutella into each cookie-dough cup.

Cover the Nutella well with some more dough. The store-bought stuff I used was so firmly shaped and cold that I could use a sharp knife to chop each portion into three equal discs. One was good to put into each receptacle to be shaped into the cookie cup; another was good as a lid for that cup. This can all happen pretty fast, since you don’t have to be too neat about it, and you can be done by the time the oven is preheated.

The directions on the store-bought dough has the baking done in 8 to 11 minutes; you can start your experimentation by following the suggestions of Mrs. Fields, or Nestle or whatever brand you bought. 

Let the cookies cool for a bit and you should be able to either shake them out of the mini-muffin tin without breaking them or – again, when they’re cool enough – by grasping the little bits of muffin-top and turning gently. They should lift out with about a quarter-turn.

Here you see two kinds of cookies in one tin: a peanut-butter-with-Nutella experiment and some peanut butter with jelly.

The cookies cool very quickly, in my experience, so you don’t have to wait too long before biting in. The Nutella inside is pleasantly goopy within minutes after coming out of the oven without being hot enough to injure — but you may still want to be careful until you’ve experimented enough to be sure.

Here you see the peanut-butter-and-jelly cookies on the left and some of that peanut-butter-with-Nutella experiment on the right.

All told, including 10 minutes of preheating and prep and a few minutes of cooling, it can be less than a half-hour until some of these cookies are in your mouth.

I’ve tried mainly chocolate chip cookie dough with Nutella, but my close runner-up is peanut butter cookie dough with jelly. You probably have your own ideas about combinations. The only question for me that remains is … what to call these cookies? A friend suggested “Nutella Bombs,” which is great but doesn’t cover varieties with other kinds of fillings. If you have ideas, let us know in the comments.

Discover more recipe inspiration from Cheapism right here.