Lately, I’ve been looking for any opportunity to write. Tumblr posts—which I often left uncaptioned—Twitter, grocery lists. I figure writing all the time can only help hone my skills.

Recently, a friend asked me to describe a cookie I had mentioned in passing. They did so via Facebook, and I saw the notification as I retired to bed. I left it, unanswered, and drifted to sleep, contemplating how one would best describe a cookie.

I like writing about food, and so I thought it would be fun to put some effort into describing what was in fact a very good cookie.

This is what I came up with:

The cookie, eh? It was round, and had the diameter of a biggish grapefruit. It was straight out of the oven when I got it. 15 minutes or so by the time I began to eat it. The cookie had a deep caramel color, and was spotted with chocolate chips. At least that’s the impression I got. I couldn’t really see the cookie. It was too fresh, too soft, to really handle, held together only by the waxed paper cookie sleeve it came in. It had a fine balance of salt and sweet, and a rich flavour which struck me at the time, and which I can still recall quite clearly. Chocolate came through quite strongly, but not overwhelmingly. A well balanced cookie indeed. The pockets of chocolate were just coming back to solidity, on that strange cusp of states of matter one wants so badly in a good cookie. It was one of those cookies, as you so clearly have divined, that needed some thinking about, some contemplation after consumption, a process I am still working through, some days later. A good cookie, a well balanced cookie. A cookie to be proud of, and to be remembered.

What’s your favourite cookie, gentle reader? Why don’t you describe it to me?