When I was a girl, my primary playmates were two kids who lived a mile down the road. A girl my age and her younger brother. Their mother was (and is) a good friend of my mom’s.

My childhood, as I’ve mentioned, was content and rather trouble-free. Whenever I went down the road, it was about playing to our hearts’ content, fending off the brother, then collectively being dunked in the tub after the day’s dirtiness. The pesky brother is now preparing to be a pediatric cardiologist.

An epic food memory is tied into these moments. Their mother made amazing chocolate-chip cookies. Luscious cookie dough went in the oven. Luscious cookies came out.

They were miraculous. They were chocolate-chip clouds. A chocolate-chip cookie is usually flat. These weren’t. They were extravagant gorgeous piles. They stayed extravagant gorgeous piles. Piles of butter-sugar-spun clouds interspersed with gooey chocolate morsels.

A child’s mind makes every everything more intense. More dreadful. More exquisite. Maybe if I beamed myself back those cookie moments, I’d really see it for what it was. Thank goodness I can’t do that. It’s locked in the magical moment vault.

I asked Laurie for her recipe. To my consternation, she told me it was the recipe off the Nestlé bag. AGH!!! It’s like that episode of Friends when Monica asks Phoebe about her grandmother’s legendary chocolate-chip cookie recipe. After batches and batches of cookies are made attempting to replicate the lost recipe, Phoebe eventually replies “Nestlé Tollhouse” in a french accent.

But Laurie did say (err, Facebook-messaged) this:

“Hi Marie - yup - I am sure that is the recipe on the bag - the secret is to take them out of the oven before they are quite done - let them sit on the rack a minute or so and remove carefully!”

Hrm, ok.

I couldn’t simply make the cookies for this post. They had to stand up to something. Something significant. America’s Test Kitchen.

ATK is a cooking show striving to achieve recipe perfection. These people are my favorite kitchen nerds. They have an army of industrious kitchen elves working behind the scenes, testing and tasting. Over and over again. Until cooked nirvana is reached.

After watching, marveling, and drooling for several months, I caved and bought the show cookbook. The only recipe we tried before that purchase was their skillet lasagna. A fast, easy piece of heaven.

On Christmas day, we made their glazed ham. I almost cried in foodgasm-driven holiday spirit. That’s it, I was going to make their chocolate-chip cookies.

The ATK afternoon started peacefully, cats lounging about.

Another element to complicate this was chocolate chips. I purchased several different kinds. I bought ATK’s taste-tested recommendation, Ghirardelli’s 60% Bittersweet.

I tasted them. They were fine, a little fruity. Hrm. I like this when I’m eating chocolate by itself, but for cookies? Hrm.

I tried the others. The Nestlé milk chocolate chips were awful. The Hershey’s dark chocolate ones didn’t leave much of an impression. The clear winner? The cheap ALDI brand I always use.

No, I didn’t do a blind taste test. I’m sentimental? Biased? The ALDI brand is straightforward. No competing flavors. Especially with what I was going to do next, though I went by the book and used ATK’s preferred chip for the first batch.

The ATK recipe makes an intoxicating dough. Two elements make this so. First, you brown butter. I’ve never done that, and I now I’m sold on it. It makes the dough more butterscotchy, more warm, more nutty.

They also advocate the use of DARK brown sugar, which further deepens the flavor.

But alas, I didn’t use dark brown sugar. I pictured them t’sk-t’sk’ing and knowingly shaking their heads as the recipe went further south than I intended it to. I used light brown sugar and added molasses. Baking blasphemy! But Google made me do it!

The cookies arrived. Pitty-Pat presented herself as a professional cookie model.

The cookies were just TOO. Too much going on flavor-wise. I blamed it mostly on the chocolate chips. The dough was complex, maybe a tad too complex. Probably my fault for that molasses addition.

A few days later, I made the Nestlé Tollhouse recipe, using the favored ALDI chocolate chips.

The cookies were yummy, but I missed the deeper flavor of the ATK dough.

What to do? The best of both, of course! I followed the Nestlé recipe, but I added the important touches from ATK. I browned two tablespoons of butter and added a teaspoon of molasses.

Delicious. Did I take Laurie’s advice to pull them out ahead of time? No. Her cookies will forever be locked in that magical memory vault. I have my own cookie for the vault now.