These superb stuffed cookies are everything and then some: ultra rich and deeply chocolate with a surprise nugget of warm white chocolate hidden inside.

Best enjoyed warm right out of oven (but, let’s face it, more than palatable even when they’re cold), these cookies are nothing short of a dream. And yet, here they are, as real and as solid as the dishes in the sink (ugh, I’ll get to those later, I promise, I’m having a moment with a cookie right now don’t ruin it for me).

These incredible cookies were inspired by Van Stapele Koekmakerij in Amsterdam, a tiny little bakery that serves one and only one kind of cookie: a rich chocolate cookie stuffed with white chocolate. If you’re lucky enough to stop by when a batch has just come out of the oven, well, you can thank me later. It’s quite possibly the best cookie I’ve ever eaten (and that’s not something I say lightly).

So obviously I had to recreate it.

You might think that a fairly basic chocolate cookie stuffed with white chocolate would be rather simple, but you’d be wrong. It took me more tries than I care to admit to get these just right, mainly with regards to the chocolate flavor of the cookie itself.

My normal MO when it comes to cocoa powder is my trusty Cacao Barry Extra Brute. It’s by far my favorite cocoa powder and I use it pretty much everywhere, from cakes to brownies to hot cocoa.

But for whatever reason, in these cookies it came out tasting… a bit one-dimensional. It was missing that robust chocolate oomph, that well-rounded flavor and sigh-inducing intensity that I remembered so vividly in Amsterdam.

I tested a few different cocoa powders and ultimately decided that a mix of Valrhona natural cocoa powder with a bit of the Cacao Barry dutch-processed was the best. The natural cocoa powder, especially the Valrhona, has an incredibly rich and profound chocolate flavor. Natural or pure cocoa powder is slightly more acidic and higher in fat than Dutch-processed, and also more intense in flavor.

You can use all natural cocoa powder here if you want instead of a mix, but I implore you either way to splurge on the good stuff. It’s really worth it!

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