Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Oatmeal Toffee Cookies

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! I've made these Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Oatmeal Toffee cookies 3 times now, and people love them! It's another Giada de Laurentiis recipe off Foodnetwork.com. It had very high ratings, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It has a good amount of stuff in it, but all of the flavors compliment one another so well. Overall, its very easy to make. The only thing that slowed me down a bit was chopping the hazelnuts and toffee.

Ingredients (makes 4 dozen)
• 1/2 cup old-fashioned oats
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup (packed) light brown sugar
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 4 ounces English toffee candy (recommended: Heath or Skor bar), finely chopped
• 1 cup hazelnuts, toasted, husked, and chopped
• 1 (12-ounce) bag semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
Finely chop the oats in a food processor. Transfer the oats to a medium bowl. Mix in the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

Chop the hazelnuts into smaller pieces than you see in the photo. I've used larger pieces and smaller pieces in different attempts, and I think the smaller ones make the cookies taste better because there are more to be evenly spread throughout the batch.

Also finely chop the toffee. These are once again too big for my taste, and I would chop them even smaller.

Using an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugars in a large bowl until fluffy. Beat in the eggs and vanilla.

Add the flour mixture and stir just until blended.

Stir in the toffee, hazelnuts, and chocolate chips.

I found it easier to mix everything by hand only because the cookie dough was so dense and I wanted to make sure all of the pieces were evenly distributed.

For each cookie, drop 1 rounded tablespoonful of dough onto sheet, spacing 1-inch apart (do not flatten dough). Bake until the cookies are golden (cookies will flatten slightly), about 15 minutes. Cool the cookies on the baking sheets for 5 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack and cool completely. (The cookies can be prepared 1 day ahead. Store airtight at room temperature.)

Enjoy!!