Best Chocolate Chip Cookies - EVER!

My mom was well known for her chocolate chip cookies. She would bake large batches and freeze them in bags of two dozen or so. My brother would consume them by the bag full when he came home from school and while watching tv. Growing up, our friends learned to check the freezer stock and most would pull out a bag and start digging in whenever they were over. Most people will even tell you they prefer them frozen to thawed or heated in the microwave. It was rare that the freezer ever lacked cookies and rarer yet that my mom would be out of the ingredients to make more. In our house, chocolate chip cookies were kind of like water - you better not run out.

My mom started with the Toll House recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag and over the years morphed it in to her own masterpiece. She never made fewer than 15 dozen and at the height of my brother's cookie consumption she may have been known to make two times that. I've "helped" her make many batches, but never had I made an entire batch on my own until this weekend.

She had a few secrets that really do make the cookies turn-out just right:

• don't over mix the ingredients
• don't use too much flour (in fact, her recipe has equal parts sugar and flour)
  
• don't pack the dough too tightly before placing it on the cookie sheet
• make two test cookies before diving in to baking the entire batch
• perhaps the most important, don't bake them too long.
  

I followed her recipe and her secrets and I must have done a pretty good job because Matthew sneaks one (or three) each time he walks through the kitchen.

My mom was not stingy with passing the recipe on, but few were really able to replicate it. Matthew has decided, at least for now, the recipe cannot be shared. If your in the neighborhood, or just have a major cookie craving, please stop by and check my freezer.