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Introduction

It’s hard to mess up a chocolate chip cookie. In the 80 years since the treat’s invention, thousands of recipe variations have been written to make the treat more gooey, crispy, chewy and generally tastier than its predecessors. Yet, it’s possible that this go-to dessert’s tastiness can be pushed even further.

We wondered if there was a way to leverage computers and hundreds of pre-existing recipes to create the most average chocolate chip cookie. Would it be bland and unremarkable? Or, perhaps like averaging human facial features, the results would be even better than each of its individual parts. Maybe an average cookie would be the most delicious of them all.

But what is an average cookie? We decided to interpret this idea using three different methods: a mathematical average, predictive text algorithms, and neural networks. After feeding each algorithm over 200 chocolate chip cookie recipes, they each generated something new. And, yes, we actually baked them.

The Mathematical Average Cookie

“Chewy and very chocolatey, no one would suspect these cookies were made with everything in your pantry.”

Get The Recipe

For our first attempt, we threw our recipe-creation back to grade school and just straight up averaged the amount of every ingredient in our set of recipes. That means we calculated the average amount of flour, and the average amount of butter, and so on. Of course, that leads to some unusual complications like non-integer quantities (how do you measure 2.85 eggs?) and ingredients that appear sparingly in the data set, like molasses or black pepper, get seriously watered down in the average. We could pretend they’re not there, since who can taste 0.002 cups of applesauce in a batch of 48 cookies? But for science, we decided to keep all 60 ingredients.

Ingredient	Amount
CookieIcons	3.526 cups flour
CookieIcons	0.394 tsp baking powder
CookieIcons	1.139 tsp salt
CookieIcons	1.370 tsp baking soda
CookieIcons	1.133 cups butter
CookieIcons	1.025 cups sugar
CookieIcons	1.194 cups light brown sugar
CookieIcons	0.125 cups dark brown sugar
CookieIcons	2.980 tsp vanilla
CookieIcons	2.855 whole eggs
CookieIcons	1.833 cups semisweet chocolate chips
CookieIcons	0.291 cups milk chocolate chips
CookieIcons	0.112 cups dark chocolate chips
CookieIcons	0.049 cups white chocolate chips
CookieIcons	0.354 cups bittersweet chocolate chips
CookieIcons	0.014 tsp almond extract
CookieIcons	0.011 cups almonds
CookieIcons	0.002 cups applesauce
CookieIcons	0.019 tbsp bourbon
CookieIcons	0.098 cups bread flour
CookieIcons	0.006 cups brown rice flour
CookieIcons	0.082 cups cake flour
CookieIcons	0.378 oz cake mix
CookieIcons	0.019 cups chocolate covered raisins
CookieIcons	0.028 tsp cinnamon
CookieIcons	0.006 cups coconut
CookieIcons	0.019 tsp coconut extract
CookieIcons	0.128 cups cookie mix
CookieIcons	0.001 tsp coriander
CookieIcons	0.057 tbsp corn syrup
CookieIcons	0.137 tsp cornstarch
CookieIcons	0.006 tsp cream
CookieIcons	0.009 cups crispy rice
CookieIcons	0.1019 tsp espresso powder
CookieIcons	0.002 cups graham cracker crumbs
CookieIcons	0.003 cups honey
CookieIcons	0.006 tsp lemon juice
CookieIcons	0.096 tsp liquer
CookieIcons	0.005 cups macadamia nuts
CookieIcons	0.032 tbsp maple syrup
CookieIcons	0.050 cups margarine
CookieIcons	0.538 tbsp milk
CookieIcons	0.005 tbsp molasses
CookieIcons	0.002 cups Nesquick mix
CookieIcons	0.002 tsp nutmeg
CookieIcons	0.055 cups nuts
CookieIcons	0.227 cups oats
CookieIcons	0.006 cups peanut butter
CookieIcons	0.002 cups peanut butter chips
CookieIcons	0.062 cups pecans
CookieIcons	0.038 oz pudding mix
CookieIcons	0.006 cups raisins
CookieIcons	0.160 cups shortening
CookieIcons	0.088 tbsp sour cream
CookieIcons	0.027 tsp cream of tartar
CookieIcons	0.022 cups toffee
CookieIcons	0.020 cups vegetable oil
CookieIcons	0.019 tsp vinegar
CookieIcons	0.326 cups walnuts
CookieIcons	0.010 cups water
CookieIcons	0.048 cups wheat flour
CookieIcons	0.005 tsp white pepper
CookieIcons	0.003 tsp xanthan gum
CookieIcons	0.010 cup zucchini

Bake 350°F for 8 - 10 min

The Predictive Text Cookie

“Big and flat, these cookies deliver a whopping taste of shortening and brown sugar.”

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Next, we decided to try something a bit more complicated called predictive text. Essentially, predictive text is like the autosuggest feature in a messenger app: you start with one word, and it gives you suggestions for the words that might follow. The suggestions you receive on your phone most likely come from a pre-loaded program that “learns” based on your texting habits. What if predictive text only knew about the word usage in chocolate chip cookie recipes? That’s the question behind this experimental cookie.

Ingredient	Amount
CookieIcons	4.0 cups butter flavored shortening
CookieIcons	3.333 cups packed brown sugar
CookieIcons	? cups white sugar
CookieIcons	4.0 cups all purpose flour
CookieIcons	1.143 tsp baking soda
CookieIcons	0.738 tsp baking powder
CookieIcons	1.0 whole egg
CookieIcons	1.0 whole egg yolk
CookieIcons	2.0 cups semisweet chocolate chips
CookieIcons	0.8 tbsp vanilla extract

Bake 350°F for 7 minutes

The Neural Network Cookie

“Like caramelized cookie brittle. It’s not terrible but it’s not a cookie.”

Get The Recipe

Our last recipe was created using deep learning, one of the most compelling recent advances in artificial intelligence. An algorithm called a neural network has changed the game in facial recognition, speech recognition, and image processing in the last few years. Neural networks train on a set of data, like a set of pictures, text documents, or cookie recipes, and can learn the patterns inherent in its input without very much guidance, if any, from humans.

Ingredient	Amount
CookieIcons	4.0 cups all purpose flour
CookieIcons	2.0 tsp baking soda
CookieIcons	1.0 tsp salt
CookieIcons	1.0 cups white sugar
CookieIcons	4.0 whole eggs
CookieIcons	2.0 tsp vanilla
CookieIcons	1.0 cup semisweet chocolate chips
CookieIcons	? cup walnuts
CookieIcons	0.5 cups white sugar
CookieIcons	0.75 cups granulated sugar
CookieIcons	0.8 cups white sugar
CookieIcons	1.218 cups packed brown sugar
CookieIcons	0.5 cups white sugar
CookieIcons	1.0 cup white sugar
CookieIcons	1.2 cups packed brown sugar
CookieIcons	1.0 cup white sugar
CookieIcons	2.0 tsp baking soda

Bake for 10-12 min

Bake for 10-12 min (again)