My mom is a baker. Not like a real, wakes up at 4am and wears a big white hat baker, but she makes sweet vittles in the oven more often than your average bear. And in fact, cookies are her specialty. But despite her arsenal of specialty biscotti and her 20-plus holiday varietals, she’s never really embraced the classic chocolate chip cookie. I mean, she’s made them and, as such, I had occasion to sample raw cookie dough in my earliest years, but my affection for this delicacy didn’t really blossom until junior high, when my school introduced its Market Day program. (If you don’t know, Google it.)

Yep, Market Day. And more importantly, Market Day frozen chocolate chip cookie dough balls. That’s right, only a greased cookie sheet and 14 to 16 minutes separated you from freshly baked chocolate chip cookies – just like Mom’s! (Or better, as the case may be.) And while that certainly revolutionized the after-school snack in my house, my siblings and I quickly discovered that exactly NOTHING separated us from delicious frozen raw cookie dough, any time we could sneak our greasy mitts to the freezer. And thus began the love affair.

So it was with fond memories of sweet, grainy dough and hard chocolate chips melting between my fingers that I ripped into Taste of Nature’s newest incarnation of my childhood treat: Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites.

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