The NYT chocolate chip cookie recipe

So I had been dying to try the New York Times chocolate chip cookie recipe ever since I read the accompanying story a couple of weeks ago -- it was the No. 1 most e-mailed story for a couple of days! That warmed my heart.

This recipe differs from other chocolate chip cookie recipes in a few ways, the most significant being that you let the dough sit for 36 hours in the refrigerator before baking. This gives the wet and dry ingredients sufficient time to mix -- apparently eggs are rather slow moving. I have to admit, it was hard to make cookie dough knowing that I wasn't going to get to eat warm, gooey cookies that night, but a day-and-a-half later I sure loved having the dough all ready to go. The recipe also instructs you to form the dough into balls the size of large golf balls -- this allows enough of surface area on the cookie so you can have a really nice variation in texture between the crunchy edge and soft center.

The recipe calls for a sprinkle of sea salt before baking -- I used my fleur de sel from Brittany. The resulting taste is sweet-salty near-perfection.

The only modification I made to this recipe is that I replaced the chocolate disks (our Whole Foods didn't carry them) with the chocolate I happened to have on hand, which included two bars of Scharffen Berger dark chocolate and two bars of Ghirardelli white chocolate. I chopped all of them up and into the batter they went. I also found that it helped to let the cookie dough soften for about 30 minutes once I took it out of the fridge -- it was impossible to spoon out before that.

On average, I didn't think this recipe took any longer than your average batch of chocolate chip cookies, but there was enough difference in taste that I think it's going to become my go-to for all future batches.