Nutella-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookie Pies...er, mini muffins

Nutella Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookie Pies - made May 16, 2019, inspired by Marsha's Baking Addiction

I didn't actually follow the recipe from Marsha's Baking Addiction in making these but hers was the inspiration for it so full credit goes to her blog. Plus, when you look at her pictures vs mine, you may want to try her recipe instead of mine so you get better looking "pies". Mine were more like "mini muffins gone mutant".

Left is how they should have turned out (from Marsha's Baking Addiction), right is how mine turned out

I had a package of ready made sugar cookie dough from when I was making the Motherlode Bars (also another baking fail, *long-suffering sigh*) and I wanted to use that up so that was the "pie crust" for these. I also wanted to make them smaller than the size of a regular muffin so I put one ready-made cookie dough portion into each mini muffin tin. If you're psychic and haven't read ahead, this is where I made a mistake. Read on, Macduff.

For the Nutella, I used the Costco Kirkland brand hazelnut spread. I've switched to this instead of the real Nutella as it doesn't use palm oil and, to me, tastes just as good. But you can use Nutella if you wish.

For the chocolate chip cookie part, I used my new favorite standby of Basic, Great Chocolate Chip Cookies. Since these were going to be mini desserts, I opted to use mini chocolate chips instead of chunks. Otherwise, I made the recipe as is.

After mixing the chocolate chip cookie dough, the rest of the recipe is just assembly. Lightly grease the mini muffin tins with nonstick cooking spray, drop a sugar cookie ball in the mini muffin cavity, and if you're lucky enough to own a Pampered Chef (or some other brand) mini tart shaper, you can easily make the cookie cups within each muffin tin.

Add a dollop of hazelnut spread in each cookie cup then cover snugly with a bit of chocolate chip cookie dough. So easy, right? Going to come out beautifully, right? Hey, why are you laughing??

Okay, fine, go ahead and laugh. As you can tell from the pictures, once again, how I viewed something and how it actually turned out seemed to be in different stratospheres of my baking universe and reality.

Turns out, each sugar cookie portion in those prepackaged cookie dough things were simply too big for mini muffin tins. And if they don't have enough room, they overflow their respective cavities and mock you. Talk about (mini) muffin tops! Insubordinate little bastards.

Unfazed, and after a self-deprecating mocking laugh (because if you can't laugh at your own baking failures, hang up your oven mitts), I did a little cosmetic surgery: I took out a round cookie cutter almost the same size as the top opening of each mini muffin cavity and cut through those overflowing muffin tops. They still looked nowhere like Marsha's Baking Addiction way-more-professional cookie pies but at least now they looked plausibly like mini muffins with a sugar cookie crust, hazelnut spread filling and a topper of chocolate chip cookie.

Thankfully, they tasted good. They would probably taste better with a homemade crust that didn't have the temerity to bake beyond the confines I put them in but that'll be a future experiment. For now, laugh at my baking fail and go try Marsha's recipe as written.