Best Damn Cookies Ever

This weekend I made the best damn chocolate chip cookies ever. These weren't just the best damn cookies I've ever made. They were the best I've ever tasted. They looked exactly like what a chocolate chip cookie should look like, and they came out crispy on the outside, but chewy in the middle. And I wish I could share Thomas Keller's recipe here, but I can't get around that little nagging voice about copyright -- which seems a bit ridiculous because aren't recipes meant to be shared. Feels like the best I can do is continually recommend the book.

What I can say, though, is that there was a little technique outside of the explicit recipe that I did. Typically, when a recipe calls for, say, 2 cups of sifted flour, I measure out 2 cups of flour and sift them. As I started to do that, my brother remembered something from a "cooking" class he took in middle school and told me the recipe wanted me to measure sifted flour instead of sifting the measured flour. So, I sifted the flour into a measured pyrex container and used that. Did it help? I don't know, but, BEST COOKIES EVER!

I did alter the recipe slightly. Mr. Keller wants you to get different kinds of essentially dark chocolate and break them into pieces (sifting out the "dust"). I just bought two kinds of good-looking chips (Ghirardelli), one milk chocolate and one darker chocolate (~60-70% cacao). It scares me to think that the cookies could have been better. I might have to stop going to work just to sit at home, baking, waiting for my next fix. You might see me someday wandering the streets, disheveled, flour under my nose, begging to use an oven or to borrow some eggs.