Sometimes summer makes me overlook chocolate. I get so excited about strawberries, peaches, plums, cherries, and especially watermelon, that chocolate can get relegated to all the months I don't enjoy these fruits in season. Then I tasted these cookies at a picnic, and liked them so much I had to make them. Soft, crackly chocolate-hazelnut cookies sandwich a layer of Nutella in little bites.
We enjoyed them at our recent Jane Austen book club picnic at World's End, and boy do we know how to do picnics right. My contributions were fried chicken, scones, and plum skillet cake. Rebecca made her "Austen" cucumber sandwiches and the most delicious nectarine-steeped iced tea, and brought real china teacups! And Mrs. Hot Potato, or "the Mrs.," as she's known on her blog, made these hazelnut baci and lemon-lavender shortbread. Yum.
The Mrs. adapted her Baci di Cioccolato (chocolate kisses) recipe to use hazelnuts instead of almonds and Nutella instead of ganache. I followed her instructions but was stumped about measuring out the dough. The original recipe calls for shaping the dough into logs of a certain diameter and then cutting up pieces. That sounded fussy, so I can see why the Mrs. used an ice cream scoop. I didn't know what size she used, and if I wasn't making these on my wacky schedule in the middle of the night I would have asked her. I used my "tablespoon" scoop, but those turned out too big, like Oreos, and a little flat though they tasted just as good.
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| Wonder about using sanding or sparkling sugar? Don't. I experimented, and it was pretty but too crunchy. |
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| Butterflies kept us company during the picnic. |
