It started with someone who doesn't like cake.

I've been baking for a long time, and cakes came first. They were always my favorite thing to bake and share with family and friends.

Baking is how I relieve stress. It's the closest thing I have to meditation. And the best part has never changed: walking in with something I made and watching people's faces light up.

She doesn't like cake. Not the texture, and not most of the flavors. But she loves cookies, and cookies became the thing we bonded over. So I started baking cookies.

For years I'd followed great bakeries across the US and around the world. I love the Great British Bake Off for how kind it is and how much skill it takes.

For a long time I tried to recreate Levain Bakery's cookies from New York in my own kitchen. Along the way, all that testing turned into my own recipe and method, pieced together from many recipes and adjusted batch after batch. Then I noticed other bakers doing the same thing: taking a recipe they made at home and building it into something of their own.

The early batches spread too thin and baked up crisp. I wanted a cookie with lift: a crunchy outside that's still soft, and a dense center.

I also wanted it to be about half chocolate, so the first bite makes you stop and say:

“Wow, that's a lot of chocolate.”

It took over a year, and a lot of honest feedback from friends and family, to get there.

Snickerdoodles are one of my wife's favorites, so that was the next cookie. It isn't the traditional recipe with cream of tartar. It's built on my own dough and rolled in as much cinnamon sugar as it will hold, so the outside bakes into a crunchy, sugary shell.

The recipes are where I want them. Next, I'm working out what it would take to bake them at bakery scale, for bigger orders on real deadlines, without changing what makes them good.