Chocolate chip cookies

This post is about something near and dear to my heart: chocolate chip cookies.

My first memory of chocolate chip cookies is making them with my friend Colleen and her big sister Terri.  I remember Terri letting us hand-mix the dough as she added more and more flour.  It would get to the point when you've added most of the flour and it gets too hard for little girl arms to mix.

My friend Tami could make The Best chocolate chip cookies.  They were so good that no one believed her when she said she was just using the recipe on the back of the Nestle Toll House bag.  One night I tried to replicate her cookies.  I failed.  I had to call her over to help me when my cookies turned out like flat amoebas.

"The secret," she said, "is adding a little extra flour.  And doubling the amount of chocolate chips." 

I have just revealed to you the secret to incredible chocolate chip cookies.  I don't know if Tami reads this blog.  I hope she doesn't mind.

I love making chocolate chip cookies.  I love eating the raw dough.  I love rolling it into little balls.  I love baking each batch for exactly 9 minutes (never 10, defintely never 11).  I love laying them all out on paper towels, where they look lovely and delicious and leave little round buttery grease spots.

I love eating one from each baking tray as it comes out of the oven.  Considering the arm work-out you get creaming the butter into the sugar and then mixing all that flour into the batter by hand, I figure you need to eat about 10 of them to fill the calorie deficit. 

I do not love creaming butter into sugar and find this a major chore. Thankfully for me, Gareth doesn't mind creaming butter into sugar.  He's really good at it.

I knew there would be things I'd have to make do without when we moved to New Zealand.  It did not occur to me that chocolate chips might be one of them.  But it's true.  I have never seen Nestle Toll House chocolate chips here.  Or even any other brand of chocolate chips.  They seem to not exist.

Ok, they sell chocolate chips here, but they are not proper chocolate chips.  They are fragments of chocolate chips.  In other words, pathetic and tiny and completely unsatisfactory.

Inadequate.

Thankfully, I have connections.

Shortly after Quinn was born, our American friend Cara baked chocolate chip cookies for us.  This was an extraordinary act of kindness because Cara had to dig into her own stash of imported chocolate chips.  I used to get up in the middle of the night to nurse Quinn and sneak into the kitchen to eat one of those cookies.  They were so perfect and familiar.

Cara recently returned from a trip to America.  She asked if there was anything she could bring back for me.  I asked for one thing: chocolate chips.  She brought me two bags.

I am baking cookies right now.  I am writing this blog post in 9-minute segments between batches of cookies.

I don't know why Blogger will not let me turn this picture the right way round. I'm sorry, but you'll have to cock your head to the right.

I am in a cookie dough-scented heaven.  My tongue burns from sugar overload.  It's awesome.

Gareth just came into the kitchen, nabbed two cookies and left.  And came back a minute later to take two more.  I said, "make sure there are some left for Friday when Cara comes over."  He said, "no chance."