nutella. ella. ella. ella.

whining does, indeed, get you anywhere. behold - teasers of the family shoot by the fabulous winnie! and, remember the getty center extravaganza? she's got a plethora of headshots of yours truly posted on her blog. winnie is doing a fabulous job of feeding my extreme narcisissm. heh.

so, after mowing through the batch of super delicious lemon crisps, i felt the need to refill the ol' cookie jar. and after spying this in my pantry:

i knew i had to try this recipe for nutella cookies that i'd had bookmarked. you know how much i love nutella, and i've been wanting to test out the myriad of ways to use the stuff aside from sandwiches and my other favorite, shoving spoonfuls of it straight from the jar into my piehole.

i mixed the dough and then tossed in the chocolate chips and chopped hazelnuts.

as comments on the recipe warned, this was quite a dry and crumbly dough. and adding in copious amounts of chocolate chips and hazelnuts didn't help much. i actually think it might very well call for too much of a good thing, as i struggled to shape the dough into balls and then break them in half as directed.

with room for only six cookies on my little cookie sheet at a time, it was quite a long process that took the better part of two hours to complete. each sheet had to bake for 17 minutes, but i used the downtime in between batches to work on various invitation orders. multitasking at its best.

and look at how pretty they turned out! as usual, the teen happily acted as my guinea pig, and i was stoked when she said they were really tasty.

she found this in her room in a bag from last weekend that we'd forgotten about, and decided it was a great time to give it a shot.

she ate one and mine's sitting in a ziploc bag, waiting for me to devour it. "it's a'ight," she said. and i'll probably be on the same page - after all, what's a reese's without chocolate?

thanks to a suggestion on my facebook, i also managed to produce a new favorite dinner entree for her this week. and it was ridiculously simple - mexican rice, topped with black beans, salsa, melted cheese, and sour cream. she got full about halfway through it, but said it was so scrumptious that she ended up polishing off every bit.

another successful week in the wan kitchen!