our favorite chocolate chunk cookies

It's been a week. And it's only Wednesday.

We're snowed in. Not unhappily so. But three small children aren't going to tolerate it for long. And the little car that came in the Cheerios box will not keep a three year old happy forever.

And snow just seems to beckon comfort food.

So we're making chocolate chunk cookies.

Because what else is there?

We take chocolate chip cookies very seriously (I'll get to the chunks in a second). I shudder to think how many different recipes we've tried in search of the perfect version. We need the cookie to be soft, crisp, sweet, salty (not overly, but present), and oozing chocolate. To add another requirement, it needs to bake perfectly when pulled from the freezer (hold, please, we'll come back and visit the freezer soon). That's a lot to ask, but some quests are worth it. After 13 years, we found our recipe.

Alice over at Savory Sweet Life has created what she calls The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe EVER! That's not an overstatement. It deserves the all caps and the exclamation point. Maybe an extra exclamation point. Alice apparently finds herself in Twitter schoolyard "my cookie recipe is better than yours" smackdowns on a regular basis. Do not fight with her. Just walk away. She wins.

Here's how we've made Alice's recipe our own...

Remember I said we like our chocolate oozing. We get the ooze on by chopping our own chocolate instead of using chips. Ain't a thing wrong with chips. They're handy and inexpensive, and Alice, I am not fighting you. But if you find yourself near a Trader Joe's, get yourself a 17.6 ounce bar of dark Belgian chocolate for about $5. Slap it down on your cutting board, and using the biggest knife you've got, start chopping. Some of it will flake which streaks the dough with slivers of chocolate. The chunks are what you're after, because when you bite into them after they come out of the oven and sit for a few minutes, you've got an ooze of chocolate in almost every bite.

Alice's recipe freezes perfectly which is good, because we need one or two cookies almost every night (we joined a gym so that we could keep our cookie habit). Instead of making a half batch, we use an ice cream scoop with a release mechanism to fill a baking pan full of unbaked cookies. Freeze them overnight, and then throw them into a plastic storage bag in the freezer. Pull out however many you need. Our oven cooks them perfectly at 360 for 14.5 minutes.

Cookies tonight. And tomorrow. And until this batch runs out and we need to make a new one.

Go visit Alice at Savory Sweet Life. And do not mess with her.

Recipe | The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe EVER!

Oh. Hi, there.

Here's the thing. We have three kids under three (that's true for a few more days. One of them has a birthday soon). We adore them. We are tired. And we are determined to make a good dinner almost every night after they've gone off to bed. And we drink a bit. A bit.


We're big fans of cookbooks and food blogs, and we rarely make up a recipe. So, we'll link you to our favorite sites. Karen takes the pictures. Chris does most of the cooking.


Hopefully you'll discover some good ideas, a shortcut, a wine, a something that makes whatever life you've got going a little better.