My earliest memories of baking are of me sitting on the counter in my favorite aunt’s kitchen when I was a three-year-old little girl. She would let me sit right next to the big, loud, stand-mixer and pour in the sugar.
I remember being mesmerized by the magical transformation of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs into the tastiest cookies and brownies.
My aunt has since passed away, but the pure joy and excitement of a three-year-old little girl lives on every time I bake.
Baking is about so much more than eating a sweet treat. Baking can cause nostalgia to rise up in us. The smells and the tastes can transport us to earlier times of simple joy in our life. It can refresh cherished memories of our favorite aunt or grandmother. Baking can recenter us in the the beauty of a life well lived.
Baking is also about the joy of gathering with friends, sharing the table with people in our home, and welcoming new neighbors that can become instant friends.
A chocolate chip cookie is a basic, but quintessential, American cookie. It is just butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, sea salt, and chocolate. But when you introduce food allergies to this simple cookie, things can go awry in a hurry.
Let’s be honest. Gluten-free and grain-free chocolate chip cookie recipes don’t taste like the real thing. Many of them are as dense and hard as hockey pucks. And if they aren’t hard as pucks, they usually taste sandy.
Sandy and hard, hockey pucks are not the cookies of our childhood.
So, with hopes of reclaiming nostalgia and hospitality for those with food allergies, I set out to make the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie.
To learn more about how you can make the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie go here.