Chocolate chip day celebrated with one of my favourite varieties of chocolate chip baking:

The banana chocolate chip muffin. The ones at this café were missing the bananas it seems.

So get this - chocolate chips were not produced until 1939. Can you imagine it? So much history with no chocolate chips?

In 1933 the owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, Ruth Graves Wakefield, altered a batch of butter drop cookies by adding cut-up chunks of a Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate bar. The cookies were a success at the inn and Nestlé offered Wakefield a lifetime supply of chocolate in exchange for permission to print the cookie recipe on the chocolate bar packaging. They sold the bars with a little tool for cutting them up but soon enough, they began to sell the chocolate in “morsel” form. Story from Nestlé here.

Now chocolate chips are put in everything baked (and not): muffins, cake, cookies, ice cream, loaves, bagels, waffles, cheesecake, brownies, other squares, etc. and they are not always chocolate. Bless the souls who invented butterscotch chips.

Finally, in case you were wondering, chocolate chips came after Hershey’s Kisses. So did Hershey start the standard chocolate chip “drop” shape using mini Kisses machines? Because I never see Nestlé chocolate chips in the grocery store. Only Hershey’s and Baker’s. Hmmm…someone needs to tour a few chocolate factories…