When: October 1
Homemade Cookies Day celebrates the act of making cookies from scratch — mixing, chilling, shaping, and baking in a home oven. It's a practice that fills kitchens with one of the most universally beloved smells in human experience, and produces results no store-bought cookie can match.
The chocolate chip cookie was invented by accident in 1938 when Ruth Wakefield added chopped chocolate to cookie dough expecting it to melt — it didn't.
Ruth Wakefield didn't want the chocolate to stay solid. She was making Butter Drop Do cookies at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts in 1938, and she expected the Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate she'd chopped and added to the dough to melt during baking and distribute through the cookie. It didn't — it softened but held its shape, creating pockets of chocolate rather than a uniformly chocolate cookie. She had invented something she wasn't trying to make. The word "cookie" itself arrived in America from Dutch settlers — "koekje," a small cake — who brought it to New Amsterdam in the 17th century. It became the standard American term for what the British call biscuits, and the small, individual, often-sweet baked good became a category of its own as American kitchens adapted European tea cake traditions to available ingredients. The chocolate chip cookie's dominance in American baking is partly Nestlé's doing. The company acquired Wakefield's recipe and printed it on their Toll...