There is a certain serendipity to the connections forged through community that almost make you weep at the tenuousness of it all: in this case, I was generously invited to attend the Bookish Ceremony Hoods Landing book club; one of the attendees brought homemade cookies, which were captivating; I asked for the recipe and learned they were by Mariam Daud, a food writer who was previously unfamiliar to me. I might have found her eventually, but would I have made these cookies? Who knows! And just how good can cookies be? Well, now I know. Hence why I’ve re-christened them The Last Chocolate Chip Cookies because I’m quite certain they’re the final recipe I’ll ever need to broach on this matter. I realise hyperbolic titles like “the best” and “the ultimate” are more about trying to entice your blog onto SEO’s dance card over any actual commitment to excellence, I hope you understand this is true sincerity and not low-hanging overkill. Plus, one of the most important things you can do as a recipe developer is to know when to concede to someone else’s excellence—I can happily cross “invent your own chocolate chip cookie recipe without thinly ripping off the Toll House one” off the list now.

You’ll see why, after one bite.

The plot thickens, however. So fervent was I about these cookies, that I bought Daud’s cookbook I Sleep in My Kitchen the second it landed on the shelves at my local independent bookstore. In this splendid book is a recipe for what she’s called “generational chocolate chip cookies”—a recipe that diverges significantly from this one. Maybe one day I’ll try that recipe and change my mind about these ones, but seeing her also sincerely-hyperbolic name for a different recipe made me feel more resolved, and as though—not to get culinarily parasocial—we were on a kind of parallel cookie wavelength.

To the recipe: This is quite straightforward, as it goes—you melt the butter and mix in everything else—but it’s not a short ingredients list, and there are specific measurements that force you to slow down and pay attention. A little friction, however, reminds you that you’re alive and that some activities are still worth investing time and brainpower in.

The only thing I’ve really done to these cookies—and it possibly sounds more flagrant than it is—is to add a couple of spoonfuls of soy sauce to the dough. This adds a further deep, yet utterly non-distracting, bass-note of toasty intensity to the finished cookies. The butter tastes more buttery, the chocolate more heartily fragrant, the brown sugar more caramelised and molasses-y. It does not in any way taste like soy sauce itself—any savouriness is entirely muffled by the flour, to the point where I was almost considering adding more, on top of the salted butter, but didn’t want to push my luck—and to that end you can consider it an optional step. But think how miso now finds herself in bed with ingredients across genres and cuisines (and occasionally in somewhat strained conditions, to be fair). It’s the same line of thought: a salty ingredient that showcases all around it. I personally can’t make it any other way now, but the cookies are notably perfect in their original iteration. This idea isn’t mine, but came to me via Reddit; a relatively non-AI-polluted area of admittedly patchy shared knowledge still left on the internet.

And, after all that, what makes these different from the five thousand other chocolate chip cookie recipes out there? (Aside from the soy sauce.) For me, it’s in the texture—where each mouthful is so exquisitely realised, trembling between chewy, almost-fudgily-cakey and crisp, that the cookie itself is the reward as opposed to a thicket you must reluctantly slash through with a machete to reach the chocolate pieces. Melting the butter provides a flood of richness saturating each crumb; from the combination of white and brown sugar come rippling shoulders of structure and a layered sweetness. Much like the soy sauce, the pinch of cinnamon doesn’t overwhelm in any way but instead offers a beguiling, gauzy backdrop to the chocolate and sugar. It’s hard to relay this without sounding like I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect but I really did bellow, “CHRIST these are good” at least once per cookie consumption.

I can’t stop making these and nor do I want to stop. They taste even better with every passing day—the centres more squidgy, the cinnamon more interwoven at a cellular level.  These are it: my cookies for life.

And if you’re feeling fairly insatiable on the topic of cookies, I also suggest these Blonde Redhead and Marzipan Fruitcake Cookies (simple method, complex flavour), these Lemon, Turmeric, Black Pepper and White Chocolate Cookies (zesty, bright yellow), these White Chocolate-Dipped Joe Froggers (intense, molasses-y) or these Chocolate Rosemary Cookies (elegant, resinous).

Finally, I know it’s been a million years since my last blog post, no one hates this more than me (I mean, no one is noticing it more than me either, to be fair, it’s a kind of self-imposed anguish) and the more that I didn’t have time to write this, the harder it became to actually get there. As always, this blog is worth making time for and crawling over gravel for, brainpower-wise, and I will do my level best to not leave it this long again—not that I’m noticeably increasing in time, energy, food-photography-sunlight or resources any time soon!

The last chocolate chip cookies

The chocolate chip cookies of my life forevermore, thanks to a series of connections that led me to Mariam Daud’s exquisite recipe. The addition of soy sauce just makes everything taste more of itself and I wouldn’t be without it; but they’re obviously delicious without it, too. As always, before shopping for these or any ingredients, I recommend checking out the Boycott Aotearoa zines so you know which brands to avoid. Recipe adapted a little from Mariam Daud, whose new cookbook I adore—I Sleep In My Kitchen: Comfort Food Recipes from My Palestinian American Home.

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 225g butter
• 275g brown sugar
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 375g flour
• 1 teaspoon cornflour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• A pinch of cinnamon
• 150g milk chocolate

1: This step is entirely optional, but it only takes a minute: Warm up the two tablespoons of soy sauce in a small pan. Once it starts bubbling briskly, remove from the heat, pour into a small, heatproof bowl, and set aside. Then—and this is where the non-optional part starts—gently melt the 225g butter in the same pan (and don’t worry about rinsing it.) At this point, set your oven to 180C/350F and line a flat metal baking sheet with baking paper.

2: Pour the melted butter into a large mixing bowl, and beat in the 275g brown sugar and 100g caster sugar with a wooden spoon. Beat in the eggs, one at a time—the butter and sugar alone won’t achieve any aeration but with the eggs it should start to form a thick, glossy and still very liquid batter. Stir in the tablespoon of milk and the teaspoon of vanilla.

3: Tip in the 375g flour, the teaspoon of cornflour, the 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder,  the 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and a pinch of cinnamon. These are all very specific measurements (well, except the cinnamon) so go slowly and, although it’s a bit annoying, I recommend measuring these dry ingredients into a separate bowl, sieving in the leaveners, and stirring them all together before adding to the butter-sugar mixture, to ensure it’s delivered evenly and without lumps. However you do it, stir it into the aforementioned butter-sugar mixture until just combined—over-mixing will result in cakey cookies.  

4: Roughly chop your 150g milk chocolate into chunks and shards and gently fold through the cookie dough. If you like, reserve a handful of chocolate to distribute evenly over the top of each cookie before baking, just to be sure everyone gets some.

5: The dough will probably appear too soft and un-cookie-like to succeed at this point—I have never had any issues with it, and the original recipe offers assurance that it can be baked immediately, but you can and should sit it in the fridge for half an hour to rest and firm up first, if that also makes you feel more rested. Either way, drop heaped, rounding spoonfuls onto your lined baking sheet, leaving some space between each cookie for spreading—eight or nine cookies is a comfortable quantity.

6: Bake for exactly 12 minutes, then remove from the oven and let them sit for a minute on the tray before carefully transferring them to a cooling rack. I have tested these at 14 minutes and they’re simply not as good—I can’t quite explain, but they taste less exciting somehow and the texture isn’t as exquisite. Refrigerate the remaining cookie dough as you’re baking the first round, and repeat the baking process again once the first batch is out.

Store the cooled cookies in an airtight container at room temperature. If you can bear it, these are more delicious once they’ve cooled and even more delicious the next day. And the next day after that? Heaven.

Makes 18-20 good-sized cookies, depending on how much cookie dough you eat while making them.

Notes:

• I’ve made these with a wooden spoon, with an electric whisk and with a food processor and, not to overstep the original recipe, a wooden spoon is absolutely fine—the melted butter never aerated much, even with the eggs added.
• If you want to skip the soy sauce step, simply leave it out and add an extra tablespoon of milk, plus a good pinch of salt.
• Needless to say you can vary the chocolate here; I have no doubt this would taste incredible with white chocolate.
• The only other move I’ve made is to slightly reduce the brown sugar, any less and you’d start to significantly change the structure—but by all means feel free to use the original recipe’s quantities.
• If the dough is looking too suspiciously liquid, gently stir in a couple spoonfuls of flour, but go slowly.

what I’ve been listening to lately:

The Perfect Needle by the Telescopes, that slo-mo washing machine beat with the sparkly guitars alone would be, well, perfect, but then the guitars distort further and the metallic whine of the chorus starts and incredible feeling of “this song, that I’ve just heard, has been with me my whole life” washes over you. That’s right, this song is new to me, look, there are only so many hours in the day!  

OOTD by Junny from her Kumara Suite EP. I know it seems like the most repetitive high praise I can give someone is “this sounds 90s” but there is nuance to my praise beyond the mere falsified comfort of imagined nostalgia! Nah, what I mean is that this makes me feel like I’m in Rivendell at Manukau City sniffing patchouli and ylang ylang essential oils (the scents of romance, according to the library books I read) and running my fingers over obsidian and jasper and quartz while Pure Moods plays in the background. But there’s layers, too—the woody clicks and bird calls alongside the concrete-knowing harmonies and interrogative menace of the lyrics, this is music for right now.

One Night in Bangkok as performed by the now late Anthony Stewart Head in the 1988 West End production of Chess. Although a great singer, he didn’t have his brother’s elastic high notes that this vocally punishing musical required; on the other hand he—and I say this watching a surreptitious recording with minus pixels—is truly acting through the role and brings something electrically, lackadaisically charismatic to the rapping here that I can only describe as Biz Markie-esque; the syllables and the beat are cousins, not twins. RIP sweet king, it shouldn’t have been him.

PS: Feeling hopeless is a luxury that serves no one but those perpetrating the hopelessness, despite the hopelessness being accelerated beyond comprehension daily. The people of Palestine need us now more than ever; aside from directly sending money when you see personal videos pop up as you scroll, you can support:

• ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal, who are connected with teams on the ground in Gaza.
• Convoys of Good, another registered NZ charity distributing aid.
• Please visit Chuffed—they’re one of the few spaces providing families in Palestine with official crowd-funding platforms, as well as for other urgent causes.
• As I’ve already mentioned, you can also demonstrate your control and power through the absence of your dollars. Boycott Zine Aotearoa has helpfully put together two comprehensive free zines so you can quickly see who to studiously avoid when buying food, drinks, household items and beauty products.
• You can also check out the Pro-Palestine Business Aotearoa account by the same people for a very solid list of places to actively focus your consumer attention on.
• Finally—as if the government couldn’t get more appalling, inept, squanderous and ignominious—you should sign this petition rightly calling to block the definition of woman and man amendment bill; and then make a submission opposing it here (with very useful info on how to do so, here.)