Agent Chocolate Chip

Hobby, Meet Mission.

I’d like to say my passion began in my apartment kitchen experimenting with different chocolate chip cookie recipes. But no, this cookie obsession was born years earlier in my childhood kitchen where Nestle Tollhouse cookie dough, Ben & Jerry’s half baked ice cream, and Betty Crocker’s Devil’s food chocolate cake made baking as a preteen easy and fun. Those simple childhood favorites inspired my appreciation for soft, chewy, gooey chocolate chip cookies packed with rich, decadent flavor.

Flash forward to 2018 when baking from scratch allowed for more experimentation with ingredients, measurements, temperatures and time. After several years of testing and tweaking in the Cookie Lab, I finally developed a recipe that suited my palette for a rich, dense, irresistible cookie.

But here’s the thing about cookies—everyone has their own definition of “perfect.”

Upon baking for friends and family, I also started sharing batches with my students. They weren’t for everybody, but they were still a hit. So much so that one student wrote a narrative essay about Agent Chocolate Chip on a mission to find the “just right” cookie. The story stuck with me. It perfectly captured what had become more than a hobby. From then on, Agent Chocolate Chip became more than just a recipe to share, but an investigation about what goes into making the ideally irresistible chocolate chip cookie.