I’ve taken off quite a bit of baby (and just plain Being Married To Keith) weight since this winter by avoiding all of those ingredients but yesterday my sweet tooth was not going to be tamed. I was reading a book about a bakery and a man who had something called “sweet sense” and well…

I had to bake something. Right then.

I looked through my recipe books and online for something new, something semi-complicated but in the end all I really wanted was dough so I went with chocolate chip cookies.

Nothing new. Nothing complicated. Just good ol’ cookie dough. Mine are a mix between the Nestle recipe and a recipe I found in Southern Lady magazine and since I couldn’t find my measuring spoons yesterday (they were hiding in the dish drainer, those sneaky spoons!) I would be hard-pressed to call it a “recipe”.

But we know that all good things start with butter.

I used my favorite pan from The Cake Pan Lady… the one I use to lay claim to mah may-un at community functions. Hee hee!

Here’s an important first step. Open the bag of chocolate chips and let them air out reeeaaaal good.

Test them too. You wouldn’t want to make a whole batch of cookies and then discover that the chocolate chips have turned bad, would you? Nope because that would be a tragedy.

Test thoroughly because sometimes the chips at the bottom of the bag are different than the ones at the top. So take lots of random samples to ensure freshness.   

It’s a miracle I have any of this stuff left in the house… by the way, the culprit turned out to be my oldest redhead. She got busted in front of her younger sister who was madder than a hornet that SHE didn’t think to steal the brown sugar when I wasn’t looking.

Truthfully, I could probably have stopped after the eggs and been happy.

But look what I would have missed. Yum.

Rather than make these into individual cookies, I like to pour the batter in a pan. I like the soft, gooey, chewiness of it all.

Today it’s back to the broccoli and the peanuts and the spinach and the fruit and I’m going to try really hard to stay away from books about bakeries.