If you recall, when we went to New York, I tried the famous Levain Bakery cookies and decided they were alright, but not hands down the greatest cookies of all time. Remember? I even made a preposterous claim that I liked my own cookie recipe better.

As a result, I decided that I needed to turn the flavor of my cookies into the size, shape, and texture of the Levain cookies, and set to work. My two biggest peeves with the Levain cookies were a) the walnuts and b) the (lack of) a good dough flavor, so that's what I set out to "fix."

There are a number of food bloggers on the interwebs that have already undertaken replica Levain recipes, so I started there. This one looked good, but a friend had already tried making this one and declared it was amazing, so that's the one I ended up using as my base recipe. That one turned out to be a good one, since the baker had already done the hard work of figuring out how much flour and chocolate chips were required to make up for the removed walnuts. And so I got to work. Here's what I did:

Ingredients:

1 cup frozen salted butter (grated on a cheese grater)
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
1 cup cake flour
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp salt
4 cups chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the grated butter and the two kinds of sugar until smooth.
Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until fully incorporated into the butter and sugar mixture.
Add the vanilla and almond extracts and mix until smooth.
In a separate bowl, combine the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until smooth. (I do this step in three batches.)
Once all the ingredients are fully mixed, remove the bowl from the mixer and stir in the chocolate chips. (There are a lot of chocolate chips, so don't be alarmed.)
Scoop the dough into baseball-sized dough balls and place them on a cookie sheet lined with either a baking mat or parchment paper. There should be no more than four per sheet. Do not flatten the dough balls.
Bake the cookies for 11 minutes, or until the tops of the cookies are the perfect shade of golden brown.
Remove the cookies from the oven and let them sit on the cookie sheet for 15 minutes to finish the baking process.
EAT THOSE COOKIES.

And oh. my. goodness. These were actually the best cookies I've ever had. My husband said, "I don't know how anyone could finish one of those in one sitting. I had a half of a half and I'm full!"

Well, folks, I'm here to say that I CAN finish one in one sitting, although I will also say that I probably wouldn't want to eat anything else until the next day, so if you make this recipe, eat at your own (delicious) risk. My friend Rachael and I sat down and consumed them alongside a glass of wine and the finale of The Bachelorette. They were, as she posted to Snapchat...

Woodstock Writings