Work in progress. This is my second take on cookies. I played around with ingredients and while the result was good this recipe will require a few more tweeks to be outstanding.

Different then the first version I tried to use hazelnuts rather than walnuts as well as two types of chocolates. Because I ran out of butter I used lard instead. The result was ok, though not spectacular.

In addition I only made half the dough and rounded down the egg to one which made the dough a bit dryer. The dough held the form way better what was unecpected.

Ingredients

• 250g cake flour
• 3,5g salt
• 5g potato starch
• 3g baking soda
• 100g melted butter (I tried lard)
• 100g powdered brown sugar
• 100g selfmade vanilla sugar
• 1 eggs
• 2cl water
• 100g fine chopped hazelnuts
• 100g white chocolate
• 100g 70% dark chocolate

Instructions

Melt the butter, chop the chocolate and nuts (I bought ground hazelnuts to start with). Mix everything together. Ensure that the sugar is very fine. If it is too course you will notice that in the cookie. Especially the brown sugar might be quite course and you might consider blending it first.

Let the dough rest in the fridge for at least one hour.

Form 100g balls and place them on a baking tray. Keep them far apart as the dough will melt and expense in diameter quite a lot. If you want them to keep the shape better you can freeze the balls for 10-15 minutes before baking.

Preheat the oven to 225 degrees and let them bake for 10-13 minutes on the upper level until they start to get some color on top. For me the downer side was the more critical as it started to caramelize pretty fast. If you are not sure if you can let them in for longer, check the downer side of one!

Once out of the oven place them on a wire rack. Don’t try to let them slide off the baking tray. Rather use a spatula. Be gentle or they will brake. They are super soft at this stage but will get harder once they cool down.

Let them fully cool down before storing or moving them.

Tips

• Do not use a preheated baking tray or the downside might get too dark
• Placing them on a wire rack for cooling with a spatula makes it easier to not brake them. I tried to just let them slide from the baking tray to the wire rack, but this ripped open a few of the cookies.

Next time …

• use 2 eggs and no water
• use butter instead of lard
• hazelnuts are a great combination with the dark chocolate but overtone the white one. Rather use almonds or walnuts in combination with white chocolate
• decide on either white or dark chocolate and develop the right flavors, the combination did not work as expected
  • the dark chocolate burned quite fast, neither white nor baking chocolate (as used in the first cookie recipe) burned as fast. If you use dark chocolate again ensure that it is fully covered in dough. Maybe even add big chunkes of chocolate in the middle of the dough balls instead of mixing them into the dough..
  • the white chocolate needs a kick, maybe some coconut would do the trick (though some acidity would be required to make that flavor work)