Perfect Crispy and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies for 1 in 20 Minutes

While I love making cookies for my friends and family, sometimes I just want fresh out of the oven, thick, gooey, warm chocolate chip cookies just for me and no one else. But often I don’t have the patience or reason to whip up an entire batch of cookies. But two cookies? Two is perfect. Two cookies is sometimes all I need and want.

This recipe is for those “two cookie” moments in life. It produces two chewy, warm chocolate chip cookies that require no special equipment (just a couple of mixing bowls), and it takes just 20 minutes to make from start to finish. 

While Serious Eats already has several amazing full-batch recipes for chocolate chip cookies, drastically scaling down a cookie recipe often requires head-scratching measurements like half an egg or wonky fractions that lead to subpar results. So here I’ve done the heavy lifting and all the calculations and tinkering for you.

My recipe below is simple and straightforward with no unexpected ingredients or laborious techniques required. You simply whisk all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately, stir together, add the chocolate chips, shape, and bake in your oven, toaster oven, or air fryer—whichever is most convenient for you. It might be the laziest cookie recipe out there, but it produces incredibly delicious chocolate chip cookies that you won’t need to share with anyone. Read on for a few basic tips and to get the full recipe.

Tips for Making the Cookie Dough

Keep the ingredient list simple with just one type of sugar. To help streamline the baking process, I tried to keep the ingredient list as simple as possible when developing and testing this recipe. Instead of using a combination of both granulated and brown sugar in the dough (which is standard for many chocolate chip cookie recipes), these cookies rely solely on brown sugar for caramelized flavor and chewy soft texture. 

Skip the baking powder. As former Serious Eats culinary director Kenji points out in his deep dive into chocolate chip cookies, baking powder generally produces cakier cookies that rise higher during baking, producing smoother, shinier tops, while using baking soda rather than powder yields cookies that are craggier and denser in texture. Cakey cookies are not for me, so I cut baking powder from the ingredient list and relied on just baking soda as the leavener in these cookies. Plus the brown sugar in the batter provides plenty of acid for the baking soda to react with, ensuring the cookies have a dense chewy texture with golden crisp edges. A shorter ingredient list and a cookie with a texture I prefer—it’s a win-win. 

Add an egg yolk. The trickiest ingredient to scale down for this small-batch recipe was the egg. Eggs affect both shape and texture in cookies. Yolks add richness with their fat and help emulsify the dough, while the egg white adds moisture and proteins that lift the dough and give it structure. I found that adding one whole egg to the small amount of batter made the dough too wet and too challenging to shape, and once the cookies were baked, they were too fluffy and cake-like from the proteins in the egg white. The solution was to just use one egg yolk. Without the excess moisture from the egg white, the dough has just the right pliable texture and the cookies are perfectly chewy once baked.

Whisk by hand. I knew I wanted to avoid getting out my stand mixer (or even handheld beaters) for this recipe, so I skipped the traditional butter creaming step of most chocolate chip cookie recipes, and I used melted butter in the dough instead. The melted butter is whisked with the sugar and egg yolk until the sugar is fully dissolved to ensure a smooth texture. While creaming butter and sugar traps air bubbles in the batter, which helps the batter rise into lighter, fluffier baked goods, I actually wanted these cookies to have a chewier, fudgier texture. I didn’t miss the butter creaming step at all, and I found I was easily able to easily whisk the small batch of dough together by hand. Just make sure the melted butter is cooled slightly before whisking in the egg yolk to ensure the egg doesn’t curdle. 

Let the dough sit in the fridge for a few minutes before baking. In his cookie recipe, Kenji makes a good argument for letting your chocolate chip cookie dough rest for an extended time (a few hours to a full day) to improve the cookies’ flavor. During an extended rest the flour and starch proteins break down, which produces more browning and flavor development during baking. If you are making a full batch of cookies and you have the time, it really is worth it to let your dough rest for this long. But I wanted my two cookies quickly, so I opted to skip this long rest. I still include a brief five to 10 minute rest—while this isn’t enough time for the flavors to deepen, the short rest gives the flour in the dough time to absorb moisture from the batter, which thickens the dough slightly, making it easier to portion and shape. When the dough is first mixed together, it has a looser, paste-like texture, but after just a few minutes of resting, it thickens into a pliable cookie dough that is easier to smooth into round balls. So don’t skip this brief rest.

3 Ways to Bake the Cookies

My favorite part about this recipe is that I don’t even need to turn on my oven to bake the cookies. I’ve written the recipe to work in the toaster oven (my preferred tool for small-batch baking) as well as in a regular oven. The benefit of using the toaster oven here is obvious: It preheats much faster than your standard oven, saving you time and cutting down on energy use. The method and timing for the toaster oven and the regular oven are similar, so those instructions are combined in the recipe below.

I’ve also included directions for baking the cookies in the air fryer. If you’re baking in the air fryer, it’s important to cut parchment paper into a thin strip and to place the cookies towards the outer edge of the cut parchment in the air fryer basket to prevent the convection fan from causing the parchment to flap around. 

Whether you’re baking these cookies in a toaster oven, conventional oven, or air fryer, make sure to let them cool briefly before sinking your teeth into one. This ensures they won’t fall apart.

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