Regular sized homemade cookies are always delicious, but they are never quite as visually impressive as the giant cookies on display in coffee shops and bakeries. While the true measure of a good cookie is in its flavor, it doesn’t hurt if the actual measurements of the cookie are as big as its taste.

And these are some very big cookies.

Each one is just about 6-inches in diameter and, as if their size weren’t impressive enough, they’re very tasty, too. The cookie recipe is easy to make and takes relatively few ingredients. In fact, it is a bit of a takeoff of the ever-popular Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe - but then again, so are many chocolate chip cookie recipes. It uses lots of vanilla extract and brown sugar, along with a generous amount of chocolate chips and butter, so it is quite rich. The cookies spread a lot and end up being fairly thin and very chewy from all that brown sugar. For a large cookie, I think that this is a really good balance because with a thicker cookie you run the risk of it being either cakey from the addition of too much flour or simply far too filling to eat the whole thing at once (and I’m not one for eating half a cookie and then walking away).

As I said, these cookies spread out quite a bit as they bake, so be sure to leave about 6-inches between each 1/4-cup ball of dough. I baked only 3 or 4 cookies on each baking sheet. Fortunately, since the recipe only makes about 14 cookies, limiting the number on each sheet doesn’t mean that you’ll spend hours in front of the oven to get the whole batch baked.

I only used chocolate chips, but you can make these a bit more substantial by adding up to 3/4 cup of chopped, toasted nuts, as well. Try to get an even distribution when stirring chocolate chips or nuts into the cookie dough; since the cookies spread out a lot, you run the risk of having one cookie with only a couple of chips and one that is packed unless you pay a bit of attention when shaping the cookies. Worst case scenario, make sure you have a few extra chocolate chips on hand and just tuck them into the unbaked dough wherever you need them.

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The winning recipe from the Pillsbury Bake-Off has been getting a bit of flak because it uses refrigerated cookie dough. As creative and tasty it may be - not to mention a good use a General Mills products, which was a requirement of the competition - for many people it seems that the recipe as it is is just a little too simple to be worth a million dollars. Good - of course. The question is how good are they? Anna, a former Pillsbury winner herself, baked up a batch of the cookies as the recipe is written and they look pretty darn tasty.

I decided to try the recipe with a twist - homemade, from-scratch peanut butter dough in place of the refrigerated kind. I actually wanted to try the recipe both ways - as written and from-scratch - and compare the two, but it turns out that my local supermarket doesn’t carry refrigerated peanut butter cookie dough at all. For the cookie dough, I used my best classic peanut butter cookie recipe and, instead of baking the cookies as drop cookies, I wrapped the dough in wax paper and refrigerated it until it was nice and firm.

While waiting, I mixed up the filling and the topping. The filling is nothing more than a blend of peanut butter and powdered sugar. I opted to use a national brand (creamy JiF) peanut butter, in place of the salted natural-style I usually like to use, to ensure that I stuck closely to the million-dollar recipe. The topping is a mix of cinnamon, sugar and finely chopped peanuts that each cookie is rolled in before baking. I used roasted, lightly salted peanuts, which turned out to be a good choice because the peanut butter was slightly sweeter than I am used to and I really love a good sweet-salty contrast with my peanut butter.

Once baked, I let the cookies cool and bit into one. It was really good, but didn’t blow me away - largely because my expectations were so high! They’re a really fun change from a plain peanut butter cookie. The cookies themselves (sans filling) were great, with a crisp/tender edge and a softer center. I usually use chunky peanut butter in my peanut butter cookies and having the roasted peanuts on top gave the cookies a deeper peanut flavor, while the sugar seemed to add a bit more crunch than usual. The filling was soft and a bit melty when the cookies came out of the oven, then firmed up a bit as the cookies sat. It was good, but a little on the sweet side. I wouldn’t hesitate to make these again (it was fun to shape the dough), but I definitely would add some salt and perhaps a bit of cinnamon to the filling to amp up the flavors even more.

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There is something very appealing about a miniature tart. It’s so much fancier looking than an ordinary cookie and seems to promise more in the flavor department, while at the same time its small size lets you indulge yourself in a bite or two without guilt. From a preparation standpoint, miniature tarts aren’t much more difficult to make than full-sized tarts are and they are certainly easier to transport and serve.

These Swedish Toscas are miniature almond tarts and the original recipe was a finalist in the 1953 Pillsbury Grand National baking competition. The recipe is supposedly a family tradition, that the winner (a Mrs. Martinson from Michigan) and her relatives brought with them when they moved from Sweden to the US. I decided to adapt the bake-off recipe a bit, making the tarts smaller than called for and using a smoother almond filling in place of a chunky one to make the tarts more visually appealing.

The resulting tarts were great and very easy to make. One of my favorite things about this recipe is that the filling goes into the tart shells while they are still hot, so there is no wasted time sitting around and waiting for the crusts to cool. I used mini muffin pans to make each tart about the size of two bites. The crust is a tender and crunchy shortbread dough that is pressed into the muffin cups by hand, rather than rolled out like a more traditional tart crust might be. The filling is briefly cooked to thicken it before being spooned into the still-hot tart shells and the pastries are finished baking. In the oven, the almond filling bubbles and becomes almost candy-like, without being too sweet.

The almond flavor is surprisingly subtle, so I like to add a bit of almond extract to the shortbread crust dough to boost the flavor. It’s optional, so feel free to omit it or to use vanilla extract, if you prefer. The original recipe calls for using the same amount of slivered almonds as I used here with almond meal. Using the full nuts gives a bit more texture to the tarts, but I prefer the look without. Either way, they’ll still be tasty.

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Chocolate and peanut butter have an interesting relationship. The flavors pair well together in just about every application you can think of, from candies and cookies to the simple, decadent late-night-snack of peanut butter and chocolate sandwiches. The interesting thing is how delicate the balance between chocolate and peanut butter really is. It’s easy to use a too-sweet milk chocolate and make sugar the overly dominant flavor in the pairing. It’s equally easy to use a dark chocolate that is too aggressive, or in too large a quantity, and will overwhelm the peanut butter flavor.

As long as you keep the goal of getting a good peanut butter flavor and an equally good, not dominant, chocolate flavor, it’s not too hard to put together things like homemade peanut butter cups. Other recipes may be a bit harder to adapt and when I set out to make a chocolate peanut butter cookie, I knew that I wanted to start with a cookie base that had a very prominent peanut butter flavor.

My favorite flourless peanut butter cookies fit the bill. The recipe is primarily peanut butter, sugar and egg and almost nothing competes with the straight peanut butter flavor. I added a smallish amount of cocoa powder to the batter to make it a chocolate one. The cocoa powder has a very good chocolate flavor; it is my favorite way to boost the chocolate profile of a recipe. Plus, it does little else to the chemistry of the recipe, while something like melted chocolate adds more solids and more fat to the batter.

The resulting cookies were outstanding. They were chewy, with a hint of crunch on the outside, and were as addictive as any peanut butter and chocolate candy I’ve had. I used crunchy, organic peanut butter to get small pieces of peanut into the cookies (a non-organic national brand, like Jif or Skippy, will work just fine in this recipe, too) and stirred in some peanut butter and chocolate swirled chips (a product from Nestle), too. You can use plain chocolate chips if you want things to lean more towards the chocolate side, or peanut butter chips if you want more peanut.

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If pressed, I would have to say that my favorite type of sandwich cookie is a whoopie pie. The confection is a soft, frosting-filled, single-serving treat that, while it looks like a cookie, is much closer to cake in texture and taste. But I still love the idea of a whoopie pie as a cookie and, to that end, I started to wonder what other types of cookies would work well in this type of sandwich. Oatmeal cookies are always wonderful when they are moist and soft, so they seemed like a natural choice to capture the soft cakiness of a whoopie pie while keeping it firmly on the cookie side of things.

The oatmeal cookies I used for these sandwiches were very soft and moist. There is butter in the recipe, but I also added a fair amount of applesauce to ensure that they stayed moist. The cookies spread out quite a bit during baking, which gives the finished cookies a perfect height (not too tall, which would make them difficult to bite into) when stacked up. They’re good plain, especially if you like the moist and chewy variety of oatmeal cookie, but I really think they’re best filled.

Because the cookies are sweet, I didn’t want to mix up any old frosting combination and slap it into the sandwiches. Not only would that be boring, but it would be too sweet. Instead, I took a tip from a recipe I saw a while ago in Gourmet magazine that used a honey and cream cheese filling for soft sandwich cookies. This filling complimented the cookies perfectly. The sandwiches are a fantastic snack and easy to pack in a lunch or purse when you’re on the go.

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Chocolate chip cookies may be the single most popular type of cookie out there, but I’m pretty sure that it is the chocolate element of the cookie that really sells it. So, if a cookie with some chocolate in it is good, one that has even more chocolate is bound to be better, right? Besides, it gets boring if you stick to one type of cookie all the time.

As much as I love a crisp cookie with some varieties (shortbread, oatmeal, butter cookies, etc), when it comes to all-chocolate cookies, I think that chewy is the way to go - and these cookies perfectly fit the bill. They are rich in chocolate flavor and have a great chew to them. I described them as “brownie cookies” because I think they have a dark and brownie-like flavor, though they don’t share the fudgy texture that brownies usually have. The trick to getting the chew with this recipe is to take the cookies out of the oven when the edges have set (you can poke them with a fingertip and they should feel firm) but the center of the cookie is not set. If you watch them bake, you’ll see the cookies “crack” a little bit as the end of the baking time approaches. Inside these cracks, the cookies will still be soft and this is what gives them the chewy texture when they’re cool.

For something other than straight chocolate, I stirred in a mixture of chocolate chips and peanut butter chips to the batter. There were more chocolate chips than peanut butter chips in my mix, but because the cookie was so chocolaty, the non-chocolate peanut butter flavor came out much better than I anticipated. To enhance it further, I actually recommend using a semi-coarse salt, like kosher salt, in this recipe. I find that the grains don’t always incorporate as well into the batter as finer salts, but in this recipe I find that the occasional, small fleck of salt on the tongue as you eat really sets off the peanut butter in the chips nicely.

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