The author's sons love her chocolate chip cookies so much that her older son asked for a giant chocolate chip cookie instead of a cake for his 11th birthday.
Courtesy of Kristina Wright
According to my two teenage sons, I make the best chocolate chip cookies in the world.I accept this compliment with the appropriate amount of gratitude and skepticism, because "my" recipe started life as a clipping from a women's magazine at least 25 years ago, which I then taped inside my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook so I wouldn't lose it.Since then, I've changed enough things — bread flour in place of all-purpose flour, half the amount of salt, a little extra vanilla, no nuts, double the chocolate chips, chilling the dough when the kitchen is hot — that it only vaguely resembles the original.The problem is that I have never written any of this down. I use the original recipe as a guide and make the adjustments according to memory. So if my kids decided to make cookies using the recipe taped in the cookbook, they'd end up with an entirely different cookie.My go-to cookie recipe became the only cookies they want"Mama, you need to write down the real recipe," my youngest son said, again, a couple of months ago, when I was baking a double batch for the student council bake sale.What's funny is that these cookies have always felt to me like the laziest, most basic cookies in the world. There's nothing fancy about them; I don't even buy an expensive brand of chocolate chips. But they're reliable and quick, and yes, delicious.Part of the reason they became such a fixture in our family is because they were easy. I'd always enjoyed baking and, before kids, would regularly bake for friends and coworkers. Then I became a mother in my 40s, and I knew I wanted to create the kind of home where homemade cookies occasionally appeared after hard days, before big tests, or because it was raining outside and we had nowhere else to be.
