If You Give a Lea a Cookie...

She will want a dozen more.

While I LOVE all desserts, I am a total cookie monster. When I first started baking in my teens, I had a few specialties. Hands down, my most popular was the chocolate chip cookies from The Joy of Cooking. My dad has a huge sweet tooth and still asks for them to this day.

This Mother's Day, I was in charge of the desserts. So I immediately thought...COOKIES! Everyone loves chocolate chip cookies and there are a trillion recipes out there, many claiming to be "the best." But who wants to keep making the same ones over and over and over? Not me. So instead, I made hazelnut toffee chocolate chip cookies.

Let's just say, the moment I ate the first one I turned blue and fuzzy. Thank goodness the recipe made about four dozen because no one wanted to stop eating these delicious morsels. My counter and kitchen table looked like a sea of cookies -- pre-scooped oven ready on sheets and freshly baked on cooling racks. Absolute heaven.

So here are my tips for this recipe:

• Since you need to put the oatmeal in a food processor, do the nuts in it too after you take the oatmeal out. Then do the toffee in there too. Make it easy on yourself -- no chopping by hand!
• Get a cookie scoop. It will be your best friend, just trust me. Plus each one will be the perfect size, making baking time easier.

General tips:

• Bring your ingredients to room temperature. You have probably heard this before, but it really is the number one rule for baking (with some exceptions). There is no way you can properly cream your butter and sugar without this step. If you are patient and do this, your cookies will be a lot softer and won't get stale as quickly.

C is for _____. Come on, go bake these already!