Oh lord, where do I begin? You know when you have one baking goal for the day and then it kind of seems like Jesus and Buddha and Mayor Daley and everyone else in charge of your life just doesn’t allow it to happen? Well, that was my Sunday. All I wanted was to make these brownies I’ve been dreaming up and it was like every star in the sky was aligned exactly in a way that prevented any store in the entire city of Chicago from having the kind of cocoa powder I needed. I went to Whole Foods, I went to Southport Grocery, I went to Treasure Island… anywhere one might expect to find this particular kind of dark cocoa and I came up empty handed every time.

I went home feeling frustrated, knowing that you guys have to be sick of reading about the various bake sales I’ve been throwing and in need of a new recipe. Then it dawned on me – bake sale, duh. As I mentioned in my last post, my friend Lisa and I recently put together a bake sale as part of a benefit for Wild Claw theater. One of the items I made was vegan peanut butter chocolate pillows from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. As she was checking one of them for quality control, Lisa said they reminded her of these ganache-stuffed chocolate chip cookies she’d had in New York. I mentioned on my Facebook page that I wanted to make those cookies for Lisa and a few people said they sounded like Keebler Magic Middles.

Homemade Magic Middles, you say? This sounds like a Bake and Destroy project if ever there was one! I could not for the life of me wrap my brain around how to keep the chocolate inside gooey once the cookie was cool, so I took a cue from the vegan chocolate peanut butter pillows and concocted a kind of dough using Nutella.

OK, so that’s the middle, but it’s not really a middle unless it goes inside of another cookie. Being that I still wanted to make Lisa’s dream cookies I opted for a chocolate chip recipe. I didn’t think my usual would hold up to being stuffed, so I did some searching and found a recipe for chocolate chip-stuffed cookies. I figured if those could be filled with chips, they could be filled with little Nutella balls. Heh… balls.

I figured wrong. I should have known from the amount of butter in the cookie recipe that these were not going to create the same stretchy, sturdy cookie cave that the ones in Vegan Cookies provide. But the fact that the recipe calls for so much dough for each cookie gave me hope that they’d turn out like those giant scone-sized cookies you see at Whole Foods sometimes. I was a fool.

So I carefully made and rolled what were, essentially, Nutella Tootsie Rolls, and made this giant batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. I fought off attempts to eat said dough from both Teno and Tony and formed giant, baseball-sized Nutella-stuffed chocolate chip cookies on two cookie sheets. I had a passing thought, before I did all the work, to see what would happen when I put Nutella in the microwave compared to what happens when I put peanut butter in the microwave. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I really wish I had preformed that little experiment and saved myself two sticks of butter and a jar of Nutella.

When the timer went off, I peeked in the oven and laughed. One sheet held a gigantic, flat chocolate chip cookie – about 12″ around. Cookie Monster would have ate that shit up. The other sheet held 6 completely flat cookies, square on the edges from running together. The Nutella turned into chocolate-hazelnut diarrhea and, in short, the ass fell out of my cookies.

As I was chiseling the least repulsive looking cookie from the pan and cursing my stupidity, Tony reminded me that failure is what Bake and Destroy is all about. I had an idea, I tried something new, and in the end, I was not successful. Big deal. We can’t all be Bakerella, you know? Shoot, even Bakerella has her off days I bet. So I snapped a picture, dumped the completely inedible cookies in the trash and left Tony to do the dishes while I started documenting the recipe so I can make some changes and try it again sometime.

Want to see if you can find the winning formula to homemade Magic Middles? Well, don’t start with this recipe!

For the filling:

• 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons Nutella
• 1/3 cup powdered sugar
• 1 & 1/4 teaspoons milk
• 1/8 teaspoon vanilla

For the cookies:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, slightly softened
• 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
• 2 large cold eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Then you probably shouldn’t:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line two cookie sheets with Silpats or parchment paper.

Make the filling first by mixing all of the ingredients with a hand mixer until it forms a moist, firm dough. If it’s a little too stiff add a splash more milk, if it’s too wet add a bit of extra powdered sugar. Knead the dough a few times and then divide into 12 even pieces. It’s easiest to to this if you slap it down on your counter – it will naturally form what looks like a giant uncooked cookie/huge cat turd. Then cut that in half and roll each half into a snake. Cut each snake into three pieces. Then roll each piece into a ball and set aside. You can refrigerate the dough balls while you work on the cookie recipe. Or you can just eat them and save yourself the heartache.

Sift the flour, baking soda and salt into a medium bowl and set aside. In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, or in a large bowl using a hand mixer, cream the butter and brown sugar for about 1 minute. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix for another rminute. Then, with the mixer on low speed, add the flour and mix until everything is incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Roll 2 tablespoons of dough between your palms and flatted slightly to form a 2 inch disk. Place the disks on baking sheets, spacing them about 4 inches apart. I could only fit 6 on each sheet. Of course, they turned into one giant cookie anyway – so who cares?

Then place one Nutella dough ball in the center of each disk and top with more chocolate chip cookie dough – try to cover the Nutella with the remaining dough. Bake for 15 minutes, then cool on cookie sheets for 10 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Ask your husband where he keeps his jackhammer, you’re going to need it to get these off the cookie sheet. Try to eat a piece you manage to break off, declare it “a bit much” and then dump everything in the sink and walk away.

So, that’s my big return to posting recipes on my blog – a big batch of shitty cookies. Whatever. I’m ordering the cocoa powder I need and so help me Godzilla, these brownies are going to be amazing even if I have to bake them in the belly of Satan himself. Oh, and Lisa and I are making a macaron video for BrutalSnack. So there’s still fight in me left.

Have you had any good recipe fails lately? C’mon, make me feel better, tell me about them.