These chocolate chip cookies are better than yours.

These choco­late chip cook­ies are bet­ter than yours.

I’m almost happy with this recipe. It gets slightly bet­ter each time, and I’ll tweak the recipe as I make refinements.

Prep time: 3 weeks, give or take 3 weeks.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup real but­ter (see note 1 below)
• 1/4 cup honey, warmed (see note 2 below)
• 2 eggs
• 3 TABLE­spoons vanilla extract, the real stuff (see note 3 below)
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar (see note 4 below)
• 1 tea­spoon bak­ing soda
• 1/2 tea­spoon salt
• 3−3÷4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups Ghi­rardelli 60% cacao bit­ter­sweet choco­late chips (see note 5 below)
• 1 cup milk choco­late chips

DIRECTIONS

1. Place but­ter in a microwave-safe bowl. If the brown sugar is clump­ing at all, place it in another bowl. Microwave both at 30% power. Watch closely; you want the but­ter to melt com­pletely, but not get extremely hot. Brown sugar gets nice and fluffy when microwaved a lit­tle. I like it. It doesn’t make any dif­fer­ence in the cook­ies, but do it my way anyway.
2. Beat the eggs together. While mix­ing, grad­u­ally driz­zle in the but­ter. (Too fast and you’ll cook the eggs. Bad.)
3. Heat honey until warm and thin; add grad­u­ally to eggs and butter.
4. Add the vanilla.
5. Cream in the white sugar and brown sugar until smooth. Mix thor­oughly, mean­ing high speed for a long time. This should be, let me empha­size, smoooooth.
6. In a sep­a­rate bowl, whisk together the bak­ing soda, flour, and salt, then man­u­ally stir into batter.
7. Stir in the choco­late chips.
8. Cover the dough and refrig­er­ate for at least 30 min­utes. More is bet­ter (to a point). Overnight is best.
9. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees.
10. Use two big spoons to scoop out a “ball” of dough. If it’s cold enough, this will be pretty hard to do. Wash your hands, since they are cov­ered with germs and bac­te­ria that are absolutely dis­gust­ing, and squish/squeeze/roll the dough into a ball some­where between an inch or two in diam­e­ter. Spread them across your cookie sheet, or save the cleanup and use parch­ment paper.
11. Bake for about 14 min­utes, or until edges are golden brown. Don’t over­bake. If any­thing, under­bake — they are sim­ply mar­velous that way.

NOTES

1. But­ter vs. Crisco: I have always been a really big pro­po­nent of using the highest-quality nat­ural ingre­di­ents avail­able. No mar­garine or syn­thetic vanillin here. How­ever, if you’re not going to eat all the cook­ies at once (which is almost unthink­able), you might want to replace a third of the but­ter with Crisco. This will help them stay softer longer. Except that they are nasty with reg­u­lar Crisco: you must use the butter-flavored Crisco. But they are bet­ter eaten fresh with all real but­ter, so just go that route. Invite a friend you really love, if you don’t want to eat them all your­self. And tell your­self it’s health­ier with­out the trans fats anyway.
2. Even bet­ter with orange blos­som honey.
3. Please, please use real vanilla if at all pos­si­ble. Look, these cook­ies are meant to be ridicu­lously deli­cious, and you are already not doing your­self any health favors by eat­ing them. Make those calo­ries taste fantastic.
4. Oooh, yummy is if you use vanilla sugar. You’ll have to make your own, since you can’t buy it. Here’s how: buy real vanilla beans. Now that you can get excel­lent qual­ity vanilla beans for a low, low price off eBay (right now you can get a quarter-pound for $4.99 plus $3 ship­ping), you have no excuse. Buy a bag and sell the extras to your friends. Any­way, take 4 beans and slit them. Put a cou­ple pounds of reg­u­lar white sugar into a Rub­ber­maid con­tainer. Scrape the seeds into the sugar and mix. Add the beans in an even dis­tri­b­u­tion. Seal the con­tainer with its air­tight lid, and let sit for at least two weeks. When ready to use, remove the beans.
5. Choco­late chips: I rec­om­mend the spec­i­fied choco­late for a cou­ple rea­sons. The Ghi­rardelli melts in the cookie (unlike Hershey’s) and has a won­der­ful, almost fruity over­tone (which is per­fect if you use orange blos­som honey in the recipe, and even bet­ter than per­fect when com­bined with the sub­tle fruit under­tones of real vanilla); in fact, in this recipe it is even liked by peo­ple who swear they don’t like dark choco­late. I find the brand of milk choco­late chips are less crit­i­cal; but they do pro­vide a nice and manda­tory bal­ance to the inten­sity of the dark choco­late. If you like dark choco­late, the 2:1 ratio of dark to milk choco­late is per­fect. If you lean toward the milk vari­ety, you could split it with a cup and a half of each. 3 cups total is plenty, but heavy-duty choco­late lovers can push the recipe to 4 cups of chips before they stop being cookies.