My obsession with chocolate chip style drop cookies, chock full of surprising ingredients is still running strong.  I should just title this the Odds and Ends Cookie blog.  In this latest rendition, I added hazelnut filled, candy coated, chocolates to the mix – I mean, that’s the fancy non-brand way of describing – Nutella in an M&M, right?  How could you resist not throwing that into a cookie?!  The hazelnut candies are pretty large so I rounded out the cookies with some regular candy coated chocolate pieces.  Can you ever have too much chocolate?

Recipe makes 2 dozen cookies.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks or 12 tbsp) Butter (room temp)
• 1/4 cup Vegetable Shortening (room temp)
• 1/2 cup Sugar
• 1 cup Brown Sugar
• 2 Eggs
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 2 1/2 cups Flour
• 1 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 cup Candy coated Hazelnut Chocolates (…you can checkout the photos to see the brand I used… pretty obvious)
• 1/2 cup Candy coated Chocolates

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F degrees (~177 C).
2. Cream together the butter, shortening, and sugars.
3. Beat in the eggs.
4. Beat in the vanilla and salt.
5. Add in the flour and baking powder.  Continue to mix until fully combined.
6. Stir in the chocolate candies.
7. Scoop the dough out onto parchment lined baking sheets – about 1 tbsp of dough per cookie.
8. Bake for 8 – 10 minutes, or until the tops of the cookies are no longer shiny.  They should be slightly puffy and soft when you pull them out, they will sink down and solidify slightly as they cool.