No cookies, unless you bake them

This site has no cookie banner that asks you anything. It only has one that tells you nothing gets set here. That's on purpose. Here's why, and how it works. And after that comes probably the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever.

But I'm warning you: this recipe sticks in your head :) I've known it by heart for about 20 years, and I sing it whenever I bake these cookies.

Top view of a pile of chocolate chip cookies in different varieties

Why I don't want cookies

In most cases, I find cookies intrusive. You shouldn't use them if you don't have to. I don't have to, and I made a conscious decision against them.

I have no interest in tracking people. I don't want to find out whether someone visits my site, which pages get read the most, or whatever else. That may all make sense. I'm still not interested.

Imagine you walk into a shop. Someone pats you on the shoulder to welcome you and sticks a tracker on your back while they're at it. From now on they know when you come back, where you go and what you looked at. I wouldn't want that. I don't want to be that transparent myself, and I don't want to do it to anyone else.

How it works

There are no cookies because I don't embed anything from outside. Everything lives locally on the site. Even the Google font. Your browser doesn't load it from Google's servers but from this site itself. That means no connection to the outside and nothing that could set a cookie.

The same goes for videos. An embedded YouTube video loads scripts and sets cookies as soon as the page opens, even if you never press play. That's why you won't find a player here, just a normal link. Only when you click it does anything happen at YouTube. You decide that, not the site.

Instead: chocolate chip cookies

About 20 years ago I went to a concert by the Wise Guys, a German a cappella group. They have a song about chocolate chip cookies, and it became such a stubborn earworm for me that I can sing my way through baking them.

The song is in German, and it's pretty much the whole recipe. You can listen to it here: Chocolate Chip Cookies on YouTube

Here's the recipe as a plain list:

Ingredients (makes about 50 cookies)

280 g sugar
40 g sugar beet syrup
200 g soft margarine
2 fresh eggs
400 g flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla powder, unsweetened
½ tsp salt
300 g chocolate, in small pieces

Instructions

Mix the sugar and sugar beet syrup in a bowl until there are no lumps left.

Add the margarine and eggs and stir everything together well. According to the song, that's the key to success.
In a second bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, vanilla powder and salt.
Add the flour mixture to the first bowl and stir only briefly. Otherwise the cookies turn out tough.
Fold in the chocolate pieces.
Put the dough in an airtight container and chill it in the fridge for 24 hours. That's what gives the cookies bite.
The next day, preheat the oven to 180 °C (about 350 °F) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Shape the dough into about 50 small balls and place them on the sheet with space between them. They spread.
Bake on the middle rack for about 15 minutes.

According to the song, you send the burnt ones to your aunt. The good ones belong to your sweetheart.