Cookies in My Life

There is something really wonderful about chocolate chip cookies. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I made them for the first time, but I know it was when I was already a pretty big girl, maybe about 12 or 13 years old. Why wasn’t I about two, like my own children, who help me with the dough or gently drop the soft, oozy spoon-balls onto the ungreased cookie sheets and then eat half the raw dough when I'm not looking?

Well, this might be hard for you to believe, but when I was two years old it was 1960, and there was some kind of weird culture thing going on then that said, "If you make it yourself, it must be inferior." It's the same attitude that discouraged breastfeeding, told women they could not give birth without extreme intervention by professionals, and you could never make any food as good as what we can make in the factory and send to you in a can, bottle, box or wrapper. My mom and I were victims of this attitude, so instead of actually making our own cookies and other baked goods, my mom purchased them in the supermarket, and used her oven to store paper bags. I kid you not, every word is true.

So at some point in my life I was either visiting at a friend’s house, or it was when I took a home economics cooking class in junior high school, but where ever and whenever it was, we took the bag of Hershey's Chocolate Chips and followed the easy to understand recipe written right on the back. Wow! What a difference homemade was from those hard, cardboard tasting facsimiles of cookies we were buying at the store. And not only did they taste great, but they were fun to make, too.

My idea of the perfect chocolate chip cookie is soft and chewy, oozing half melted chips as you slowly bite down and tear away the luscious, warm, brown-sugary and margarine delight. I didn’t know exactly how to get that soft chewiness at first, and often my cookies came out hard and crunchy, not at all how I like them. But then I discovered a more precise recipe for "perfect chocolate chip cookies" which explained that the shorter you bake them, the chewier they are.

Some people, like my own children, would be perfectly content to dispense with the baking part completely, and just form little balls from the dough and eat them raw. I know this is not unusual, and there is even an ice cream flavor called "cookie dough." This however is not my style, and I bake my little cookie delights until they are just done, and no longer. They are a little hard to handle when they are just out of the oven, but if you wait a few minutes until they cool a bit, they are perfectly wonderful.

About the Author

Angela Jackson lives and bakes in the Westchester County area. If you don’t have time to bake your own special cookies, there is a unique place you can go to get the perfect cookie when you are in the Mount Kisco area called Connie’s Bakery. Not only are the cookies and other baked goods Connie Milstein bakes wonderful, but all her profits go to charity.