Marguerite Gaquin, daughter of late Toll House baker Sue Brides, and I succumb to the charms of Boston TV host Maria Stephanos, up to and including Gaquin showing us her mother’s original recipe! As chapter one of my book explains, Brides was chief baker for cookie inventor and Toll House restaurant owner Ruth Wakefield and was at her side when Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie. See more photos and what Gaquin says is the real, original recipe at WCVB’s website.
This chocolate chip cookie book writer rests on the expertise of all the chocolate chip cookie book writers who have gone before. That includes A Baker’s Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies author Dede Wilson, whose neat Half and Half Chocolate Chip Cookies are highlighted in the p. 169 “Cookie Artist” sidebar of The Great American Chocolate Chip 
Cookie Book. Dede was nice enough to interview me on her Bakepedia website and also reproduced one of my personal favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes in my book (an award-winner from the late, great California Copia culinary center). Bakepedia’s other chocolate chip cookie attractions include contributor Lauren Chattman’s story testing whether it’s worth resting cookie dough on the refrigerator (Spoiler: It is, especially if you can wait for 36 hours) and recipes for one-bowl and giant chocolate chip cookies.
An adaptation of Metropolitan Bakery‘s Salted Chocolate Chip and Sour Cherry Cookie recipe that appears in the book was one of 25 recipes featured in the Washington Post Food pages’ annual holiday cookie issue this week. That section also contains a story (supplemented online by this video) by Post columnist Stephanie Witt Sedgwick suggesting ways to make your chocolate chip cookies stand out on a holiday buffet table. Since she likes the basic Nestle Toll House recipe, her ideas mostly focused on varying the size of both the cookies and the chocolate chips you use.
My wide-ranging chat with Hadas Kuznits about the book and the chocolate chip cookie’s invention aired on Philadelphia news radio KYW-AM’s “What’s Cooking” show this weekend.
Winner Johnson (center)
I’m not a downhill skier but if I were, there’s no question where I would do my skiing: At the Beaver Creek Resort in the Rocky Mountains, where they serve free cookies every day at 3 p.m. The 2013 edition of their annual Chocolate Chip Cookie Competition, discussed in Chapter 6, which celebrates Beaver Creek’s cookie-serving tradition, was held the day before Thanksgiving. This year’s winning recipe from Coloradan Nancy Johnson features milk chocolate chips and — no doubt to make up for their extra sweetness — a little bit less white sugar.