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BOOK EXCERPT
📖 About Bart Smith: How Cookies For Dinner Started Bart's Cookies (In 1988)
Excerpted and adapted from the book Why I Make The World's Best Chocolate Chip Cookie! by Bart Smith. Reprinted by Permission.
IT ALL STARTED WITH ONE BRILLIANT DECISION I MADE BACK IN AUGUST OF 1988: I WAS GOING TO HAVE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES FOR DINNER! That's right, ladies and gentlemen. I was about to begin my freshman year at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, living approximately 2,254 miles away from my mother, when something occurred to me as I sat in my apartment wondering what to eat. I was officially living on my own! Nobody was standing over my shoulder telling me to finish my vegetables, eat my dinner, or save dessert for later. I COULD EAT ANYTHING I WANTED, WHENEVER I WANTED! So naturally, I decided that a big batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies would make a perfectly acceptable dinner. HA-HA!
I jumped into my black Laredo Jeep, drove to the grocery store, bought the ingredients, and returned home to bake my very first batch. When those cookies came out of the oven, they were warm, rich, wonderfully delicious, and exactly what I was hungry for. Little did I know that one college student's unconventional dinner choice would develop into a cookie-baking adventure spanning more than 35 years, an estimated 250,000+ chocolate chip cookies, thousands of happy encounters, and eventually an entire business built around something I genuinely LOVE TO MAKE AND EAT!
FROM COLLEGE COOKIES TO BART'S COOKIES
As the years passed, I kept baking cookies for friends, family members, coworkers, clients, and just about anybody who expressed an interest in trying one. I brought them to company potlucks, holiday gatherings, business meetings, and other occasions where a batch of delicious cookies could make everybody smile. Sometimes I even sent cookies to clients along with an unpaid invoice, and wouldn't you know it? Suddenly, getting paid became a whole lot easier! Apparently, receiving a box of wonderful chocolate chip cookies has a fascinating way of reminding people they owe you money. CRUNCH, CHEW, YUM—AND THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL, BART! Now THAT'S what I call delicious customer relations!
Eventually, people began asking whether they could BUY my cookies, and I realized I might have something worth developing beyond my own kitchen. I registered BartsCookies.com back in 2002, built the website myself, added an online shopping cart, and received my first online cookie order on February 7, 2011. Over time, I shipped cookies to more than 1,000 customers throughout the United States, with additional orders reaching several international destinations. I learned a great deal about e-commerce, online payments, shipping, packaging, baking in quantity, and running a food-related business. During one particularly busy Christmas season, I even baked more than 800 cookies within 24 hours. YOU THINK SANTA GETS TIRED DELIVERING PRESENTS? TRY BAKING 800 COOKIES IN ONE DAY!
SIX FLAVORS, ONE VERY PARTICULAR COOKIE BAKER
Throughout my cookie-baking adventures, I focused on six delicious varieties: Milk Chocolate Chip, Dark Chocolate Chip, Milk & Dark Chocolate Chip, White Chocolate Chip, White Chocolate Chip With Macadamia Nuts, and Peanut Butter With Milk Chocolate Chips. Each one begins with my personal approach to making chocolate chip cookie dough, followed by the baking techniques I've practiced and refined over decades. I take tremendous pride in their appearance, size, texture, chocolate content, and consistency. MY COOKIES DON'T LOOK LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE'S COOKIES, AND I CERTAINLY DON'T WANT THEM TO!
But here's another important part of my story: I'm not interested in spending the rest of my life operating a bakery and personally baking cookies from sunrise to sunset. I enjoy baking tremendously, but I'm also an author, entrepreneur, consultant, website developer, marketer, and content creator. I've written dozens of books, developed numerous websites, produced hundreds of videos, and worked on projects covering a wide variety of subjects. I'M A MARKETER AND CREATOR WHO HAPPENS TO MAKE ONE HECK OF A CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE! My ultimate goal isn't simply to bake more cookies myself. It's to figure out how to share my recipe and baking methods with millions of people so they can enjoy making these cookies in their own kitchens.
WHY WRITE AN ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES?
Because I have a STORY TO TELL, my friends! And not just a short little story about mixing flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and chocolate chips in a bowl. We're talking about decades of baking experience, photographs of my cookie creations, customer stories, written reviews, testimonials, production techniques, marketing ideas, and an ambitious business vision for taking my cookies to a much larger audience. I DIDN'T WANT TO WRITE AN ORDINARY COOKIE RECIPE BOOK. I WANTED TO DOCUMENT THE ENTIRE ADVENTURE!
The result is Why I Make The World's Best Chocolate Chip Cookie!, a massive, full-color book that explains why I believe my cookies deserve that title, what makes them different, how people have responded to them, and what I intend to do with my recipe in the future. The book is available in print and can also be read online for FREE. One important detail, though: THE ACTUAL SIGNATURE RECIPE IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE BOOK. Releasing that little treasure is part of my larger business plan, and when the right opportunity arrives, I intend to share it with the world in a BIG WAY!
FINAL WORD
Looking back to that evening in Athens, Georgia, I never could have imagined that one batch of cookies for dinner would eventually lead to hundreds of thousands of cookies, a website, years of customer experiences, an enormous full-color book, and an ambitious plan for changing how people bake chocolate chip cookies. Sometimes the most remarkable business and creative adventures begin with a simple idea that brings you genuine enjoyment. Mine just happened to involve a baking sheet, a few basic ingredients, and a rather LARGE APPETITE!
AND HERE WE ARE, ALL THESE YEARS LATER, STILL TALKING ABOUT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES! I couldn't be happier. Now I want to share the rest of this delicious adventure with you, from the baking methods I've perfected to the people who've tasted my cookies and the big plans I have for what comes next. SO, TELL ME SOMETHING: WANNA TRY ONE? OR DO YOU WANT THE RECIPE? 🍪
(THIS CONTINUES IN THE BOOK)
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KNOW SOMEONE WHO COULD?
This article is adapted from the About Me First section of my book, Why I Make The World's Best Chocolate Chip Cookie! Wanna Try One? ... Or, Do You Want The Recipe? Inside this 460-page, full-color book, I document my journey from a college student baking cookies for dinner to an entrepreneur with decades of cookie-making experience, approximately 250,000+ cookies baked, six signature flavors, and hundreds of customer stories, reviews, and testimonials.
You'll also discover my unique baking philosophy, cookie photographs, production techniques, and my plans to bring Bart's Cookies to kitchens around the world. You can purchase the full-color paperback or read the entire book online for FREE!
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