It’s my daughter Rose’s birthday. I should be making her a French Silk Pie, which is her favorite birhday treat. But she lives 250 miles away, so we’re baking cookies in her honor.

Is this my Devil or Angel side? The Dark or the Light Side of chocolate?
Or was I just tidying up my “baking basket?” You know – the catch-all that contains partially used bags of chocolate chips, butter brickle bits and tantalizing goodies of all sorts.

I’m in a vicious cycle that goes like this:
1. Chocolate chips go on sale, (or I find an excuse to buy them at whatever price) along with butterscotch and peanut butter bits. I tell myself I’ll bake for my grandchildren, or a neighbor or the poor hungry kids in China.
2. I bake and sample the batter and the fresh warm cookies. The experience of warm cookies makes me forget about my bossy bathroom scales and the too-tight pants hanging in my closet. I’m a junkie on a high and I think only good things are possible at this moment.
3. The next morning, my bathroom scales have a chat with me and I decide to give away the rest of the batch. Unsuspecting neighbors love me for my impulse-baking.
4. Next I clean out the sugar in my cupboards, shine my halo and resolve to eat healthier – i.e. without cookies.
5. I walk around for days thinking about baking cookies.
6. I find myself in the baking aisle of the store – just for a whiff, mind you. But I’m clutching a coupon and soon my grocery cart is piled high with the forbidden goods.
7. Back at home, I feel remorseful. I watch Dr. Oz to encourage my resolve to eat healthier and I stash the baking bits in a sack in the back of an unused closet in the basement and try to forget about their existence. But I know they’re there. They call to me to rescue them and give them a higher purpose.
8. I dig into the closet, pull out the mixer and the cycle begins anew. I repeat steps 2 through 7 like a crazed Betty Crocker.

c is for cookie

Ingredients for the Dark and White Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup softened butter (2 sticks)
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 cups rolled oats
2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup butter brickle bits
3/4 cups white chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips
Note: Traditionally, you are supposed to mix the dry ingredients separately and then put them into the wet ingredients. However, I have discovered in my 50 years of cookie baking, that the soda and salt blend much better when they go into the wet ingredients, so that’s what I do.

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Get out several cookie or bar sheets. No need to grease them.
Put the butter into your mixing bowl and beat until it’s smooth.
Add the sugars and vanilla and beat until incorporated.
Add the eggs one at a time and beat for 30 seconds after each addition.
Now add the dry ingredients in the order listed.
When the flour and oats are incorporated, stop and add the chips and butter brickle bits. Fold these in by hand.
Use a small scoop or tablespoon to drop them onto the ungreased baking sheets.
Bake about 12 minutes. More if you like them crisp; less if you like them chewy.

The combination of the white and dark chocolate chips is a nice contrast. The addition of the butter brickle bits adds a caramel hint throughout the cookie like a sweet little kiss.

Dark and White Chocolate Chip Cookies are not quite like the “Black and White” cookies featured in a Seinfeld episode, but they’re a Midwest version with the blend of dark chocolate and white. Devil or Angel? You decide.