Chocolate chip cookies may be one of my favorite sweets ever. They were the first treats I learned to bake as a kid – recipe straight off the bag of Nestle chocolate chips – and to this day, I can’t resist them. I love the ones that you can suck on and just taste the butter. Yum.

And while the classic’s about as good as it gets, that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to try new things. Over the years, I’ve tweaked the recipe slightly, using all brown sugar, adding in some old-fashioned rolled oats, sprinkling them with a bit of sea salt at the end. And every time I scroll through Pinterest and see a riff on the recipe, I pin it.

That’s what happened with this monster of a recipe for Super-Thick Chocolate Chip Cookies that was published on the Serious Eats website (one of my favorite for recipes). The developer is Stella Parks, author of BraveTart, a recent addition to my cookbook collection. To celebrate a friend’s birthday a few weeks ago, I decided to make them. The recipe only yields eight cookies, but they’re gigantic – thick and chewy and filled with chocolate and nuts. I actually ended up baking only four of them (they don’t hold for too long) and freezing the rest, unbaked, for a future treat.

The nuts and the chocolate give the cookies a lot of structure, so you don’t want to skimp on them. I recommend following the recipe as written at first, then getting fancy if you really feel that you have to. And make sure there’s enough milk in the fridge to serve on the side – you’re going to want it.