Few things are as comforting as warm chocolate chip cookies and milk. Last night, Kathryn Stevens, Brian Adamowsky and I spent a couple of hours mixing dough, chatting and, well, eating cookies. However we cookie bakers forgot to drink the milk until we had already eaten our share of cookies. It was all still good.

Baking cookies is one of the most satisfying ways to use the kitchen. At my house, we almost always have all the necessary ingredients waiting in the pantry. I love how quick it is for the ingredients to to go from flour, butter and sugar to warm, gooey and delightful.

A regular Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe was used for one batch, and the other batch was a variation on Chocolate Hazelnut Crinkle Cookies from the 2006 December issue of Gourmet Magazine. The December issue of Gourmet is one I look forward to with as much anticipation as opening presents on Christmas morning. It is a present filled with mouth-wateringly good cookie recipes.

For the crinkle cookies, I didn’t have hazelnuts and none of us really felt like adding any nuts to the cookies anyway, so they were nut-free. Because they make almost any cookie better, we added 6 ounces of chocolate chips. I also used 1/4 cup of cream instead of whole milk, because that’s what I had on hand and used Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder, which is a Dutch-processed cocoa powder, for the same reason. I think natural cocoa powder would work just fine. We didn’t chill the dough. Instead, we made them just like regular chocolate chip cookies, dropping them onto parchment-lined cookie sheets. We also waited until after the cookies were baked to add the powdered sugar, none of us felt like rolling them in the sugar prior to baking. It’s way easier to dust the little brown blobs with sugar once they’re on the cooling racks. Over all, I think they turned out fantastically.