Stuffed Dark Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

The thing about being a teacher in summer is that you are simultaneously free and not free. Free from the classroom, from the bell schedule, from the gentle tyranny of the photocopier. Not free from the mind that is always, always planning — reading new books that might work for the curriculum, clipping articles, making notes in the margins of novels I have taught for twenty years and still finding new things in them, because great literature is a house with infinite rooms. This week I reread The Great Gatsby and found a sentence I have somehow overlooked for thirty-seven years of teaching it. How is this possible? Because reading is not a fixed activity. We read with the eyes we have, and my eyes at fifty-nine see things my eyes at twenty-two did not.

I channeled this restless teacher energy into the kitchen, as I always do. I made babka this week. Chocolate babka — the good kind, the Ashkenazi kind, the kind that starts with a rich yeast dough that you roll and fill with chocolate and butter and twist into a loaf that looks like a braid made by a baker having a very good day. Babka is ambitious. It requires time, patience, and the willingness to accept that the first one might not be beautiful, but beauty is overrated and taste is not. My babka was not beautiful. My babka was delicious. Sylvia's babka was both, but Sylvia had decades more practice and a natural elegance with dough that I, despite forty years of trying, have not fully inherited.

I brought a loaf to Mrs. DeLuca next door. She ate a slice standing in her doorway and said, "Ruthie, you are a menace to my waistline and a blessing to my soul." I take this as the definitive review. Mrs. DeLuca has been eating my food for fifteen years and has never once been wrong about it. She is my most reliable critic. Marvin always says everything is wonderful, which is loving but not useful. Mrs. DeLuca will tell me if the babka needs more chocolate. This time it didn't. This time it was right.

I wrote about babka on the blog — about how babka is the show-off of Ashkenazi baking, the one that requires real effort, the one you make when you want to prove something, if only to yourself. I wrote about the women in the shtetl bakeries who made babka for Shabbat, who braided chocolate into bread the way they braided hope into everything — because what is Ashkenazi cooking if not the insistence that sweetness is possible even when the world gives you no reason to expect it?

Marvin ate three slices. He said, "This is the best thing you've ever made." Weekly declaration. I let him. The babka was good. The blog post was better. The summer rolls on.

The babka was gone by Sunday — Marvin saw to that — but the urge to do something ambitious and chocolatey in the kitchen did not leave with it. When I want that same spirit of effort-rewarded-with-richness without committing to an entire babka project, these stuffed dark chocolate cookies are what I make: they have that same sense of a surprise hidden inside, the same insistence that if you’re going to do chocolate, you should mean it. Mrs. DeLuca has already put in her request for a batch.

Prep Time: 25 minutes | Chill Time: 30 minutes | Cook Time: 12 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 7 minutes | Servings: 20 cookies

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened dark cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups dark chocolate chips, divided
20 teaspoons chocolate-hazelnut spread (such as Nutella), frozen on a lined sheet pan into 1-teaspoon mounds

Instructions

Freeze the filling. Drop 20 level teaspoons of chocolate-hazelnut spread onto a parchment-lined sheet pan, spacing them apart. Freeze for at least 30 minutes until firm. This is your stuffing — do not skip the freeze or it will melt into the dough before the cookies set.
Make the dough. Beat butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar together in a stand mixer on medium speed for 3–4 minutes until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla.
Add dry ingredients. Whisk flour, dark cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt together in a bowl. Add to the butter mixture in two additions, mixing on low just until combined. Fold in 1 1/2 cups of the dark chocolate chips with a spatula.
Chill the dough. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Cold dough is easier to wrap around the frozen filling without tearing.
Preheat and portion. Preheat oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment. Scoop the dough into 20 equal balls (about 2 tablespoons each). Flatten each ball in your palm into a disk roughly 3 inches across.
Stuff each cookie. Place one frozen hazelnut-spread mound in the center of each disk. Fold the edges of the dough up and around the filling, pinching firmly to seal. Roll gently into a ball and press a few of the remaining chocolate chips onto the surface of each.
Bake. Place 10 cookies per sheet, spaced 2 inches apart. Bake for 11–13 minutes, until the edges are set and the tops look just slightly underdone. They will firm as they cool — do not overbake, or the dark chocolate turns bitter.
Cool and serve. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. The filling will be molten at first. Allow at least 10 minutes before biting in, or accept the glorious consequences of not waiting.

Nutrition (per serving)

Stuffed Dark Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies — When the Babka Is Gone and the Chocolate Craving Isn’t