My first encounter with Dave Rathbun was at the 2005 BusinessObjects Insight conference at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Kissimmee, Florida. The most packed breakout rooms at that event were for speakers-like Dave- from Integra Solutions, a consultancy in Dallas, Texas. It never occurred to me that one day Dave and I would be coworkers.

Dave would occasionally fill in as instructor for Integra’s BusinessObjects classes, especially if Alan Mayer was busy. One of the benefits of having Dave as your instructor is that he always brought homemade chocolate chip cookies to class. Dave has now retired from the analytics world. I never had the honor of sitting in on one of his advanced universe designer classes, but I did get the recipe from his website, which has since been decommissioned. You can still find the recipe in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but I felt it might be useful to repost it again here.

Classic Dave Cookies

Wet Stuff

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) of butter (margarine)
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

Dry Stuff

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt

Not Optional

• 1 package of chocolate chips

Optional

• 1 cup pecans or walnuts

Directions

Put all of the Wet Stuff into a large bowl. Mix well with a blender (you can mix by hand if you want, but Dave uses a blender). Set aside.

Mix all of the Dry Stuff, except for the chips, in a smaller bowl. Once mixed, slowly add the Dry Stuff to the Wet Stuff and mix with a large spoon. When the dough is thoroughly mixed, add the chips and the optional nuts, if desired.

Spoon generous globs of dough onto a cookie sheet. I use a heaping tablespoon of dough for each cookie and get about 8 to 10 cookies on a large cookie sheet. If made properly, you should get about 20 cookies per batch. That’s part of what makes them Dave Rathbun Cookies.

Bake for 13–14 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove from the oven and let the cookies sit on the baking sheet for a few minutes to ensure the bottoms are crispy. Then remove them from the baking sheet and allow them to cool completely on a cookie rack.

Serve with large glass of milk.

Comparing Dave’s Recipe to the Original Toll House Recipe?

• The “back of the package” Nestle Toll House cookie recipe can be found on Nestle’s Very Best Baking website.
• Dave uses more white sugar and less brown sugar, but still the same total amount of 1 1/2 cups.
• Dave uses half the butter of the original recipe.
• Dave’s original recipe states that a bag of chocolate chips is 16 ounces; however, 12 ounces has been the standard Nestle bag size since the 1970s.
• Dave’s bake time of 13-14 minutes is longer than Nestle’s 9-11 minutes because he uses “Heaping tablespoon” instead of Nestle’s “rounded teaspoon”. Oven temperatures vary, so don’t overbake.
• Dave doesn’t specify a brand (Nestle, Hershey’s, Ghirardelli, Guitard, etc.) or type (semi-sweet, milk, dark) but Nestlé Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chips are traditionally the “gold standard” both for the flavor profile of the chips and the recipe on the package.

Other Notes

• For an interesting variation, use half milk chocolate chips and half dark chocolate chips in place of semi-sweet chips.
• I never tried Dave’s blender technique and use a KitchenAid stand mixer instead.

Enjoy!

Have you baked a batch of Dave Rathbun’s world‑famous cookies? Or tasted a cookie baked by Dave Rathbun himself? Share in the comments below!