Ah, chocolate--my favorite comfort food. And I can't decide what's more heaven-on-earth--the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven or the bite of a still-warm cookie.

"Think of what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about 3 o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap," wrote Robert Fulghum with inspirational passion.

Toll House cookies were first invented in 1930 by dietitian and food lecturer Ruth Graves Wakefield who with her husband converted an 18th century rest stop for horses into a popular restaurant called the Toll House near Whitman, Massachusetts.

One day, Wakefield was fixing a batch of her popular chocolate butter drop cookies. By accident or experimentation, she substituted baker's chocolate with semi-sweet chocolate bar "cut into pieces the size of a pea." She expected the pieces to melt when baked. The chocolate did not melt. And the Toll House cookie was born.

Because of the recipe's popularity, in 1939 Nestlé created tiny pieces of chocolate--"chips"--in convenient, ready-to-use packages. With Mrs. Wakefield's permission, the candy company published her recipe on the back of the chocolate chips bag.

Over 70 years later, it's the same recipe for the most popular cookie of all time. Nestle Toll House has become more than cookies, celebrating a deeply satisfying experience shared by families over generations.

"Enough chocolate chip cookies are baked each year to circle the globe 10 times," calculated writer Catherine Thimmesh. According to Thimmesh in her book Girls Think of Everything (2000), nearly 100 million bags of chocolate chips are sold every year, enough to make five billion cookies a year.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.