The perfect cookie would bake itself

The message arrived silently and went unnoticed for more than an hour as I set about my usual morning routine blissfully unaware. 

In one fell swoop, my husband wordlessly sent a family challenge in the form of a forwarded recipe from the New York Times: "A Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie."

The picture alone set off a flurry of replies.

The boy weighed in first, taking himself out of the running: "chocolate chip cookies are gross, wake me when you bake brownies."

The girl wasn't impressed by the picture-perfect confection proffered by her pop.

"I prefer the Toll House," she typed back, referencing Nestle's premixed batter packaged in a yellow casing and found in the dairy case next to the pre-shredded cheeses. "Perhaps we can do taste test bake-off."

"If you bake them, I will eat them," came my husband's self-sacrificing reply.

"Oh sure," I type, "That sounds fair."

"I'll just cream two kinds of sugars with softened butter, add the egg (which I have weighed to make sure it is truly "Large" and not "Extra Large") and the dry ingredients (which I've sifted twice and blended in small increments until it has entirely incorporated).

"And you'll slice a loaf of chilled cookie dough, baking a tray of disks for exactly 8 minutes. And I will have to go to the store and procure all the ingredients, including yours. I predict you will even have the temerity to steal space in the oven I have preheated."

She scoffs an interruption as I open my mouth in protest. "You won't need the oven any time soon. Your recipe requires the dough sit and chill for 12 hours before baking. You are essentially making "breakfast" cookies.

I hate to admit that she's right. How can they call these perfect? Easy would be ideal but settle for foolproof. Heck, I'd even say perfect would mean finding superfine sugar without having to visit four stores. 

(I didn't find any, in case you were wondering … already we were starting with an imperfection).

As she lounged on the couch, hanging upside down on the cushions and flicking through movie options on Netflix, my arm already felt fatigued from the manual folding part of the recipe. And, with each further sprinkling of flour, my inward panic grows over whether this is the dash that will break the dough into crumbled bits.

I wondered if I'd made a mistake to eyeball the salt?

Who am I kidding?

If I were a character in an 80s movie, I'd have tipped an ash from a cigarette into the batter along with the unmeasured cascade of chocolate chunks and given it all one last half-hearted stir.

Now that instant gratification had been erased from the recipe, I had lost an equally weighted portion of enthusiasm.

I might not even sequester the mixture in the fridge for the duration. Two hours should suffice in our newly fritzing fridge.

When it's almost time (fifteen minutes is the new forty-eight hours), I pop the tray into the oven and watch the batter balls deflate into an almost perfect circle. It's center slightly domed, and its edge lightly browned.

The hunks of chocolate melting into a more artful mosaic as if hand pieced.

They slid off the cookie sheet and onto a cooling rack with ease. 

They were the most beautiful looking cookies I'd ever made.

How did this happen?

The girl's cookies, just as perfect in shape and symmetry, had been done ages ago and were already arranged on a plate when the man who started the grudge match followed his nose to the kitchen.

He didn't notice that vanilla was left out of the recipe by design. Or that the sugars had been substituted by necessity. 

He pretended he couldn't tell the difference by looking at them. ...

But when he said the "perfect cookie" had too much salt, he was just rubbing it in.