The time has come to speak of something very near and dear to my heart.

Cookies.

I love cookies. All kinds. But my favorite is the absolute classic of chocolate chip. Sure, sometimes i flirt with the peanut butter cookies with hershey’s kisses in them. And sometimes my head is turned by oatmeal. but my heart belongs to chocolate chip.

And my stomach. And my taste buds.

So, you ask, how do i go about making my personal chocolate chip cookies?

Well, i shall tell you: it’s a secret.

Ok, so Im totally lying. It isn’t. I start with the basic toll house recipe.

ive tried other recipes – many many other recipes. but i always come back to toll house.

There are some tricks to making the most fabulous chocolate chip cookies ever, though.

1. Use real butter. No fake stuff.

If you use fake stuff, you run the risk of the oil content being too high, which will make your cookies spread way out and overcook.

2. Use ROOM TEMPERATURE butter.

It needs to be spreadable but not melted. This is VERY important. If it’s too cold, the dough will be too stiff and hard to stir and kinda chunky. If it’s too warm, which here means melty, the dough ends up too runny and pourable.

Please do not pour your cookies. It’s weird.

3. Salt is salt is salt, in all honesty. But, using a courser grain salt makes them sooooooo.yummy. The salt brings out the sweetness.

4. Check the expiration date on your baking soda. I have a bad habit of having multiple boxes of baking soda and using whatever one comes to hand. Not too good when you just grabbed the deodorizing box from the fridge. Ew.

5. Semi sweet chocolate chips make it best. Milk chocolate chips are WAAAAAY too sweet, and I dont care for dark chocolate. Check your labels – some of the store brand chocolate chips cant really be considered “chocolate.”

6. Eggs is eggs. I tend to use egg beaters, which we keep in the freezer, as eggs are hard to get out here and are reserved for things like fried eggs over easy (someday, i will tell you all about why breakfast is better for dinner, and why pizza is never a bad thing in the morning, but that day is not today)

Lately, we’ve been lazy and doing cookie cakes. With this recipe, use a 9×13 pan or divide the dough into two pans. Otherwise, it wont cook through, which we found out the hard way. And then we took spoons, and ate the middle out of it.

Yummy.

Iffen you’re concerned about fat and oil and suchlike, there are a couple of things you can do.

1. replace oil with applesauce.

ive found that this works best if you do half applesauce/half vegetable oil. If you replace with all applesauce, it changes the texture. Added bonus: you can reduce the sugar a little, as the applesauce is a sweetener.

this is either a problem or a help for us batter eaters. if you’re trying to avoid eating the batter, its good, because it makes it taste a little odd and again, texture. if you WANT the batter, its bad.

2. Splenda instead of sugar.

i havent tried any of the other fake sweeteners, but Splenda gives odd results for me. if i use all splenda, the cookies have a strange aftertaste. When I use it, i use it 1:2 with sugar – it takes care of the aftertaste issue, but lowers the sugar content a little.

again, batter eaters, this is good or bad. the taste and the texture are definitely different. kinda yicky, as far as im concerned.

3. I havent tried doing both at the same time. somebody try it and let me know what you think.

Now, for some reason, im having a craving. And the kid is asleep, which means I can actually finish the batch!

…and stop eating the dough.