The sequel....mixed with chickpea salad.

I made my special chocolate chip peanut butter bars. They were moist but crumbly, gritty like tightly packed sand. They were divine. I couldn't manage to cut most of the pan into rectangles, but I got maybe 6-8 of them, another half dozen or so of rhomboid and trapezoidal shapes, and the rest smaller chunks and crumbs unfeasible to eat by hand and which I plan to eat by placing a measured amount into a cup with milk (which I do with ordinarily-shaped bars anyway, so it's not an issue for me). 

My preferred cookie texture varies based on the type of cookie - peanut butter, with or without chocolate chips, is by far superior in a dry, crumbly form. For chocolate chip, I've developed a taste for hard, crackly (almost caramel) texture, and I like them cold. I don't like hot, gooey, just-baked cc cookies - the hand burning, practically dripping with grease, the chocolate chips having melted into a ganache... Such is why I often freeze my chocolate chip cookies, and may even make them hard by melting the butter-salt mixture into a near-caramel state. I should eventually try actually mixing melted caramel squares (or my own homemade caramel) into the dough, and having whole bars, or just bars broken into their factory-molded blocks if they're large enough (like a Lindt bar - a sea salt or chili bar would be great), pressed into the dough after it's chilled. Now, in contrast to my preference for both chocolate and peanut butter cookies, white chocolate-macadamia nut cookies are excellent soft and warm. Good white chocolate is always mild (unlike Toll House white chocolate chips, which are fucking putrid), but liquid white chocolate doesn't overwhelm my palate like melted dark or semisweet chocolate does. I think the key for the palatability of fresh-baked wcmn cookies is the consistent hardness of the macadamia nuts, which provide a textural contrast with the soft cookie and white chocolate. The mild flavor of the macadamia nuts also helps. Cc cookies in a warm, soft state don't have these advantages. On the other hand, the mildness of this cookie makes them unpleasant when frozen and hard. 

Oatmeal-raisin cookies - which, by the way, I love, yet haven't made or eaten in over a decade because I tend to fuck them up every time I try - are only good soft and warm. I've tried my hand at oatmeal-raisin cookies, attempting the classic soft, mount-shaped form, always to end up with a kind of UFO-shaped lace cookie with a small mount in the center. I dislike lace cookies. I dislike any extremely thin, crackly version of something that is typically thick and soft, for that matter (think thin crust pizza, which can get fucked along with its defenders. I think foods like this (ok, not lace cookies, but in the mid-'00s people suddenly became transfixed with flattened-out versions of snack and "junk" foods) are only popular because people unconsciously hold a superstition that you can avoid weight gain by eating foods that are thin. Stupid motherfucking diet culture). I recognize my onus to make a proper oatmeal-raisin cookie. Let me look at my schedule....

My texture-temperature preferences for sugar cookies and snickerdoodles are identical- soft, but not warm - ideally room temperature or cold (but not frozen). I also need to make some good soft, cushiony sugar cookies and/or snickerdoodles again. I did make perfect ones a couple years ago, but wouldn't you know I completely forgot which recipe I used...

The cookie is a pretty dynamic confection, but when you think about it, most cookies are just variations on these - OK, chocolate chip with walnuts now, maybe trail mix (never fancied that), oatmeal without raisin or with walnuts, cranberry and white chocolate, whatever. Cake or pudding mix cookies, funfetti cookies, cookies with broken up candy (good) or containing other, prepackaged cookies (just eat them separately, for fuck's sake, it will taste better), cookies appropriating the key ingredients of other desserts (mostly bad, with exceptions; my aunt makes a killer s'mores cookie). Almond cookies, gingerbread cookies, cookies with unconventional spices like rosemary and parsley, black and white cookies (just a piece of cake with icing on top?), Lofthouse cookies (I haven't had since gradeschool, remember being decent but I was very sensitive to the icing). 

Now that I think of it, I might actually make those rosemary cookies...