Chocolate Lava Cookies: Assemble, Chill, and Bake

Notes:

-This can be mixed by hand but it’ll be a little bit of an arm workout — if you have a stand mixer or hand mixer it’ll save you some time and effort. 

-These cookies do best when baked off directly from frozen, so I highly recommend you mix and assemble and freeze them the day before you want to serve them.

-A word of honesty on the heart shape of these cookies; it’s not easy to keep them heart shaped, these cookies want to spread and they want to be round, so getting them to be heart shaped is a liiiittle bit of a fight. Save yourself the effort if you like and leave them round, or, follow the tips in the recipe to achieve a *mostly* heart shape. Or, if you have a cookie mold you can bake in, feel free to use that!

-Portion and chill your fudge filling: Remove fudge filling from fridge. Once your fudge filling has set it should be firm but still pliable. Spray your hands with a little non stick spray (or just literally rub your hands with some butter, no judgements) and pinch off a piece that is about 1 ½ Tbsp large. With your greased hands, roll your fudge into a ball, and place on tray or plate (something that can fit in your freezer). You can eyeball the measurements for the fudge, but you want to end up with enough fudge balls for each piece of cookies dough (approx.16).

-Place portioned fudge balls into freezer for at least 30 minutes before moving on to assembly. 

-Assemble and chill your cookies: Once your fudge balls are well chilled, remove from freezer, along with your chilled cookie dough. The goal here is to bore a hole into your portioned cookie dough, place the fudge inside, and encapsulate your chilled fudge within the dough. This can be a sticky messy process, so ensure your components are well chilled or it will make this process much harder. 

-Using your thumbs, bore a hole into the center of your chilled dough, slightly larger than large enough to hold your frozen fudge ball. 

-Place frozen fudge ball within, then pinch and squeeze your dough around the fudge until fully encapsulated. Roll a few times in your hands to shape into an even ball. Inspect your dough and ensure that you smooth together any cracks in the surface of the dough, this will help ensure no fudge leakage upon baking. 

-If pursuing the heart shape: hold dough ball in one hand and with your dominant hand use your pointer finger to press a dent in the top of the dough. Then, create a ‘V’ shape with your thumb and pointer finger and pinch the bottom to create a slight point. Play around a bit (who says you can't play with your food?!) to get as close to a heart as possible!

-Otherwise, place onto lined tray, and repeat for all of your dough. Feel free to get creative with your fillings (I added a swipe of marshmallow fluff inside a few of these cookies along with the fudge and it was great).

-Once all dough has been assembled, wrap well in plastic wrap and place in freezer for at least 1 - 2 hours, or better yet, overnight. 

-These assembled cookie dough balls can be kept in the freezer, unbaked and well wrapped in plastic, for up to a month, ready to be baked whenever you want. 

-Bake: When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 350 f. Once heated, Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Bake 6 cookies at a time, dough pulled right out of the freezer, evenly spaced on your tray. Top with flaky salt, if desired, right before baking. 

-Bake for 15 - 17 minutes. Your cookies should spread enough to double their footprint, puff slightly, and give you that signature crackly brownie skin. It’s better to slightly underbake these cookies than overbake them (they are lava cookies after all).

-If pursuing the heart shape: These cookies, as mentioned in the note above, want to spread. So, odds are, they’ll end up looking pretty blob-y right out of the oven, even if you pre-shaped them into hearts in the dough stage. To combat this here’s what I did: directly upon taking them out of the oven, using a small offset spatula or the back of a spoon, scoot and squish the edges of each cookie back into that heart shape. Since the dough is still hot and pliable, if you sculpt it into a heart shape now, it’ll hold once it’s cooled. Again, this is a pretty artistic endeavor that also requires working with molten hot dough, so do so at your own risk. 

-Once sculpted, allow to cool to the touch, make sure to use a spatula to remove these cookies from their tray (their bottoms will be a little delicate due to the molten fudge filling.)

-If leaving round: Remove from oven and allow to cool to the touch, make sure to use a spatula to remove these cookies from their tray (their bottoms will be a little delicate due to the molten fudge filling.)

-I love eating these still slightly warm for the oven to really drive home that ooey gooey lava situation, but they keep well covered at room temperature for 2 - 3 days.