I think I have a stalker. Actually, I’m 99.9% sure I have a stalker. Most people might be freaked out to know that they have a neighbor who watches for them to come home from work or wherever they’ve been each day and knows what car they drive and exactly where they live. Surprisingly enough though, I’m not that concerned because I have these gut feeling that my stalker is harmless. It might be the fact that she’s still under 3.5 feet tall or isn’t yet four years old that makes her seem more like a friendly shadow and less like a cloud of doom. There’s just something heartwarming about a lil munchkin who waits for me to come home, so she can come over and jam out to Paramore or create ‘toddler art’. So as I pulled up and parked yesterday after escaping work early, I had to smile as she screamed my name and came running over to check out what I was carrying in my bags. When I told her I was making cookies, she looked up at me with those huge brown eyes giving their best puppy dog expression and asked if she could help. There was no way I could say no.

It had been a month since I’d had time to spend time in the kitchen for fun, and I was looking forward to a marathon baking session. As always, I was not planning to make a dozen or so cookies and be done. Nope, I was counting on making at least 150 cookies to deliver to a friend’s workplace for their birthday today, neighbors including my helper’s family, a box of goodies I needed to mail to a friend, and my twenty-eight student workers for our staff meetings the next two nights. After insisting that we both put our aprons on before we began, my personal baking helper and I started to gather the needed ingredients for cookies. I had considered tackling a more extravagant cookie recipe like Dreamsicle cookies or Snickerdoodles but decided that there really was nothing better than simple, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and I had just the recipe. I’m not sure about you but when I think of the perfect chocolate chip cookie I think about soft, chewy cookies that are more likely to melt in your mouth than break your teeth. This recipe creates the most amazing, perfect cookies that will have people asking if you bought them from a bakery or the store. My only recommendation to you if you do decide to trust me and try this recipe is don’t enlist a three year-old to be your sous chef. They might look adorable in your apron, but they really just want to spend the whole time tasting the dough.

Fluffy, Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ingredients:

• 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 cups unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 small boxes of instant vanilla pudding mix
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 18 oz. mini semisweet chocolate chips

Fluffy, Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Directions:
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and allow butter to soften.

2) In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Beat in the instant pudding mix until blended. Stir in the eggs and vanilla.

3) Sift together the flour and baking soda. Slowly, add flour mixture into creamed mixture until well-mixed. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips.

4) Drop cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. (I use my small cookie scoop for cookie uniformity.)

5) Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven. Edges should be golden brown.

6 ) Once you remove the cookie sheets from the oven, bang the sheet on a hard surface causing the cookies to deflate. This will remove all of the air from the cookies and all them to stay soft longer. Place on cooling rack until firm enough to stack in air-tight container. This should make between 80-100 cookies depending on size.