Note: This column is written by Bradley Walther, a sophomore at Pandora-Gilboa High School. Paula McKibben, Bradley's teacher, sent it to The Icon.

The Perfect Recipe
One cup of softened butter, one cup of white sugar, one cup of packed brown sugar, two eggs, two teaspoons of vanilla extract, three cups of all-purpose flour, one teaspoon of baking soda, two teaspoons of hot water, half a teaspoon of salt, and two cups of semisweet chocolate chips.  Bake at 400 degrees for 8 to 12 minutes. 

These are the ingredients and steps to making my all-time favorite dessert – chocolate chip cookies.

Chocolate chip cookies have been making kids like me smile since 1930 when Ruth Graves Wakefield of Whitman, Massachusetts, accidentally developed them. She had been making chocolate cookies and, running low on baker's chocolate, substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate into the recipe. Wakefield was the owner of a very popular restaurant called the Toll House Inn and began serving her new creation to the public through the dessert menu. 

She finally came out with the golden recipe in her 1936 cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes. Americans immediately became obsessed with the cookies and couldn't get enough of them.

I was first introduced to chocolate chip cookies when I was about four or five years old. My mother would make batch after batch of these cookies every Christmas and I remember just loving every single last one of them. 

My father and I would sit down at the counter together with a tall glass of milk and just plow through dozens of them.  I am very lucky that my metabolism didn't give out on me because I could have become very large from my cookie consumption.

When I was about eight years old, I could make an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies in about 25 minutes by myself. I would make a batch about every other week, and it came to the point where my mother needed to cut me off from my chocolatey obsession. 

When I was about 11 years old, I decided that I would give up chocolate for Lent, not realizing that that involved my cookies. They were some of the hardest, worst, most tasteless 40 days of my life.  In retrospect, I should have given up something like fruits or vegetables instead of sacrificing something that tasted like magic.

In writing this essay, I have consumed about five or six chocolate chip cookies. They were incredibly motivational in talking about how great they really are. I have realized that in writing this, I might be sounding like a total pig, but I believe that when something is that good, everybody should know about it.