Chocolate Hazelnut Chewies
Chewy chocolate cookies made with egg whites, nuts and powdered sugar.
Servings 10
Cost 5
Ingredients
- 1 ¾ cup powdered sugar about 6.8 oz
- ⅓ cup unsweetened natural cocoa powder Hershey’s
- ⅛ teaspoon salt
- 2 large cold egg whites organic eggs seem to hold up better
- ½ teaspoon vanilla
- 1 ⅓ cups toasted and chopped hazelnuts or 2 ½ small bags of Diamond**
- Optional – very small handful of mini chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line two large baking sheet with parchment paper or nonstick foil.
- Stir powdered sugar, cocoa powder, and salt together in a small bowl.
- Place cold egg whites in very clean metal or glass mixing bowl.
- With an electric mixer, beat until the egg whites are just past foamy and soft peaks are just beginning to form. Add the sugar mixture gradually (but not too gradually – a couple of tablespoons at a time is fine) and continue mixing on medium and scraping sides of bowl.
- When dry ingredients are completely blended, beat for exactly two minutes. Mixture will thicken slightly, but it will not be light and fluffy like meringue. Stir in nuts and chocolate chips (if using).
- Working quickly, drop heaping tablespoons of batter onto the baking sheets – try to keep them as tall as you can, but if they spread that is okay, spacing about 2 ½ inches apart.
- Bake the cookies on the center and lower rack for 10-12 minutes or until dry, puffed and cracked on the surface. If you like your cookies with very soft centers, take them out and let them cool. For slightly dryer (but still chewy) centers, turn off the oven and let the cookies sit in the “off” oven for 20 minutes, them remove from oven.
- Let the cookies cool for about 5 minutes on the parchment paper. Carefully remove cookies and let cool completely on a wire rack.
Notes
I have made a ton of meringues over the past few weeks and through trial and error, found that organic eggs worked better than regular eggs. Interestingly, room temperature and non-organic egg whites beat into peaks quickly, but didn’t hold up as well when sugar was added. Cold egg whites and organic egg whites took a few seconds longer to beat into peaks, but were more stable when additional ingredients were added. In this recipe the mixture will still collapse a bit when you add the sugar, but when the nuts are added it should still be thick enough to stay in little piles on your baking sheet.
