7-Minute Chocolate Chip Cookies .. Warm, gooey, and ready in no time cookie cravings don’t stand a chance

My aunt Chris has been making cookies for Christmas since before I can remember, first a handful of recipes for the family to enjoy before we all left for mass on Christmas Eve, then more — a lot more — at a standalone event a week or more before Christmas Day. In different years, she’s overseen as many as 14 varieties baked in a single day (using a single oven), by as many as five bakers (plus children), to serve as many as 60 (or more) people. For the record: We have never even come close to running out of cookies.

While the result is undoubtedly a colorful and delicious cornucopia of sugar and butter, what’s most impressive to me are the logistics of the marathon baking day itself. That is, wrangling the people, mixing bowls, ingredients, oven temperatures, spatulas, and cooling racks so that everything is done in time for our dinner of takeout Peruvian chicken, yet another family tradition. Key to our scrappy, one-day-a-year cookie processing plant are simple, quick cookie recipes like these. For every batch of pâte à choux, there’s also a peanut butter cookie we could make with our eyes closed. Lucky for us — and you — we don’t have to choose. Bake them all!