Happy National Chocolate Chip Day!

Everyone loves a good homemade chocolate chip cookie. They’re simple, sweet, and iconically American. And they pair perfectly with a cold glass of milk or a cup of coffee. But did you ever wonder where the idea came from? We did and decided to share the story with you.

The original Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe - the one that appears on their semi-sweet morsels bag - was created by accident by Ruth Wakefield in 1938 for her popular Massachusetts restaurant , the Toll House Inn.

Trained home economist and dietician Ruth, with her restaurant cooking assistant Sue Brides, was experimenting with pecan drop cookie dough. Ruth felt there could be more interesting variations. She planned to melt baker’s chocolate and add it to the dough. When she discovered she was out of baker’s chocolate, she looked around her pantry and found semi-sweet chocolate bars. She chopped the bar into small bits and sprinkled them into the blond dough. When the cookies were baked, she discovered the chocolate had not melted or been absorbed. She named the cookies "Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies," and her diners loved them.

As customers began to request the cookies, word spread. The Toll House Inn featured the cookie recipe in some of their ads then in their cookbook. Marjorie Husted, who was publicized as Betty Crocker, featured the cookies on a popular radio program. As Nestlé’s sales went up, the company began coming up with product changes to encourage more sales. The first effort was to pre-score the bars to make it easier for home cooks to use the ingredient. 

Stories differ as who approached whom, but one way or another, Wakefield and Nestlé entered a partnership. Nestlé gained permission to print Wakefield’s recipe on the back of their packaging. In return, it was said that Wakefield received a $1 payment for rights to the recipe, all the chocolate she would need for a lifetime of baking,  and a consulting deal to work with Nestlé on other recipes.  (Perhaps more money changed hands later.)

The chocolate chip/morsel we know today wasn’t actually invented until 1941, four years after Ruth Graves Wakefield decided to add cut-up pieces of a chocolate into cookie dough. Because of the popularity of Wakefield's recipe, Nestlé developed and began to sell their famous chocolate morsel drops under the Nestlé Tollhouse name.

Who doesn't love an oatmeal cookie? It's a classic in every grandma's kitchen. But is your grandma's recipe chewy? Does it have great texture? This one does!

We've slightly adapted a recipe by Rebecca Firth for National Oatmeal Cookie Day, April 30. She has tons of great and reliable recipes in her book The Cookie Book  and on her baking blog, displacedhousewife.

These oatmeal cookies - made with bread flour for a better chew - are the ultimate in comfort food. We made our cookies with golden raisins and toasted, chopped pecans. Feel free to substitute the raisins for your favorite dried fruit (or leave them out all together). You can also add nuts and/or chocolate. Consider this a wonderful, oat-y base for whatever flavors strike your fancy - or whatever is in your pantry right now.

The recipe makes about 24, 3-inch cookies. They should keep around 3-4 days at room temperature in a sealed container. You can also freeze for up to 3 months.

We in the SideSwipe kitchen have a (small) obsession for super-crunchy peanuts we buy from Costco. And we looove salty-sweet snacks. So when we saw this recipe in Valerie Gordon's book Sweet, we had to give it a try (with a few tweaks, as per usual).

The unusual ingredients create a symphony of textures and flavors that makes these little blondies really sing. Salty and sweet! Soft and crunchy! In some of the photos, you'll see we added a drizzle of melted chocolate. Double chocolate and a final sprinkle of salt really dresses up these bars for a party.

We like this as a small (half) batch bake, and we include baking directions below in our notes section. Enjoy!

These cookies are the perfect not-so-messy project to bake with your kids or grandkids for the Easter holiday (or if you just want to make cute little bunnies). These tender cuties come together in a flash in your stand mixer with only six ingredients you probably already have in your pantry. It's up to you and your co-bakers to decide which colors to use, which flavor you like best and if you want to make them into cats instead!

Allow two hours total to mix, form, refrigerate and bake these cookies. Recipe makes about 36 bunny cookies.