The secret to making perfect chocolate chip cookies

If these chocolate chip cookies are my only achievement for the entirety of last year’s lockdown, I think I’ll be satisfied: crisp and buttery on the outside, fudgy and sweet within, with pools of dark chocolate, and just the right amount of salt.

As ever, with baking, there are always substitutions you can make, if you don’t mind a slightly different (but still delicious) end product. Sub in the light brown sugar for dark brown sugar for an even deeper toffee flavour, or swap out the caster sugar for granulated or demerara. Strong white bread flour will work, if you can spare it, and rye or spelt flour will produce a damper but nuttier cookie (a delightful variation, in my books). You can lose the vanilla paste entirely, or replace with almond extract, or a good grating of nutmeg. Any chocolate will work, although I prefer the bitterness of the dark chocolate as a counterpoint to the unashamedly sweet dough. If you fancy, lose the chocolate entirely and replace with nuts or dried fruit. Sometimes I brown the butter for these cookies (melting the butter until it foams up and turns mahogany-coloured, smelling of toasted nuts, before letting it cool back down to solid form), for an even more complex flavour and chewy biscuit, but if you’re short on butter, margarine will work too.

We all need a little rest sometimes, don’t we? Cookie dough generally benefits from an overnight rest in the fridge: it makes you more likely to get a puffy little cookie with a soft inside, as the fridge-cold fats will take longer to melt in the oven. But more than that, it hugely improves the flavour, by allowing the sugars and flours to hydrate, which creates a more rounded, complex flavour. It sounds faffy, I know, but I promise it works.