Your Best Chocolate Cookie

Now, blame it on the fact that we made these bright and early on Tuesday morning, but this ingredient shot has a few errors: the recipe calls for baking soda, not baking powder, and there isn't any vanilla in these cookies. Luckily, we realized our mistakes before we actually made them!

Does anyone know a brilliant trick for softening brown sugar?

Because cocoa powder has a tendency to clump, it helps to sort of cut it across the top, rather than just sweep, otherwise you may lose some of your carefully measured cocoa.

The key ingredient in this recipe: espresso powder.

Teamwork.

This dough has an incredible texture.

Folding the chips in by hand helps guard against over-mixing.

When mixing dry ingredients, a whisk works best.

Variations on a color theme.

While the butter and sugar are creamed -- we let the mixer go for a long time -- we line up the rest of the ingredients.

We like Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract -- a little more expensive but worth it.

That's the Skippy peanut butter going into the creamed butter.

The peanut butter makes the mixture beautifully silky.

How many cooks does it take to tip the dry ingredients into the mixer?

Sticky!

Use a nice coarse sea salt, like fleur de sel or Maldon sea salt, for finishing the cookies.