A friend recently asked me how I choose what to make on my adventures in baking. Well, occasionally I whip up family favorites or requests, often I play around with tastes and textures in baking experiments, and sometimes there are recipes for desserts and confections that have long been on my “to bake” list. And then — increasingly as my baking prowess swells — there are those fresh and boxed treats that I come across in my daily trips to local food shops and down grocery store aisles when I taste and peer at the item, inspect the food’s list of ingredients and say to myself: “I can make that… and without all those nasty preservatives and unpronounceables, at a fraction of the cost.” And so I was inspired to make biscotti…

Get your tastebuds and a tall glass of milk ready (dairy, soy, rice or otherwise): these are chocolate chip cookies, the chips gone wild edition. Slightly crisp, with a soft, chewy, melt-in-your mouth inside and three types of chocolate in the chips, the classic cookie has been kicked up a notch.

I’m not a coffee drinker, but if I were, this is the cookie I’d want to nosh on while sipping my cup of joe, espresso, or caramel macchiato. But don’t take my word for it: my java loving hubby gave the partnership two thumbs way up after “testing” the hazelnut butter “nutella” cookie with cup after cup of his favorite Just Us Coffee brew.

Talk about a mouthful. This is a suped up version of my traditional (and somewhat famous) oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. In addition to the loveliest plump organic Thompson raisins, I’ve added  a handful of crushed cashews to boost the crunch factor, and malt-sweetened carob chips to amp up the melt-in-your-mouth quotient.