If you're one of those food fascists who doesn't eat cookie dough because you fear either fat or salmonella, I have no words for you.
If you don't love eating raw cookie dough hand over sticky-knuckled fist, preferably with a wooden spoon large enough to spank a vegan bloody, get off my fucking lawn already.
Baking cookies is a litmus test for a happy childhood. It's how kids learn to follow directions, clean up after themselves, and know their limits (i.e., quit before you puke). I can't recall the first time I made cookies—it's like trying to remember your first hug. My maternal grandmother, Roberta, was a Tollhouse traditionalist. When she was baking, I'd hover around her like a diabetic pigeon until she'd feed me dough and let me stir, dictating the next steps in her smoke-graveled voice. My mother loved making dough but loathed the baking process; our cookies usually turned out larger than carpet squirrels and twice as nutty. Every Christmas, my paternal grandmother and my dad would make biscochitos, an anise-packed cookie popular in New Mexico.
In college, I perfected my own chocolate chip dough by browning the butter, cutting the white sugar and adding lime juice, unsweetened coconut, and a little salt. At some point, like my mother, I decided dough was better than cookies and stopped baking. But as I graduated from being an adolescent with a hard-on for tooth decay to a Modern Working Woman, I spent less time making (and eating) dough.
Then, about a year ago, I discovered the chocolate bombshell that is Cougar Mountain Baking Company's chocolate chunk cookies and its tubs of refrigerated take-and-bake dough.
To be clear, the dough isn't as good as my own, but it's a close second: caramely, with the faint sandpaper texture of brown sugar, and generously packed with chocolate chunks, as advertised. I eat through about a tub a week. It never graduates to cookies.
Like me, 44-year-old Cougar Mountain founder David Saulnier began perfecting his own chocolate chip cookie recipe in college. Unlike me, he was not a born baker. Saulnier was hungry after work one night, had all the ingredients handy to make the $5 American dream, and got to work. The next night, he did it again. "It was my first experience baking cookies. And pretty much immediately, I started experimenting with ratios and ingredients," he says. "I made cookies every night for a month. At the end of that month, I couldn't make them any better."
Saulnier's dad was an entrepreneur. With his help, Cougar Mountain Baking Company was founded in Sodo in 1988.
Saulnier embraces the Seattle edict of knowing where your ingredients come from and buying local whenever possible. His pasteurized eggs come from a farmer in Yelm (which is why the cookie dough is safe to eat raw), his flour from a co-op in Eastern Washington, and he's trekked all over Hawaii and Oregon to check out where the coffee, macadamia nuts, blueberries, and hazelnuts used in his cookies are grown.
"Because if you're going to have sweets in your diet, why not make them the best they can be?" he says.
The small factory now resides in Magnolia, where 24 full-time employees work to make roughly 20 varieties of cookies—from staples like the chocolate chunk and oatmeal raisin cinnamon to seasonal flavors like orange cranberry and pumpkin—and distribute them from Bellingham to Eugene. It's a family-run operation: Saulnier's wife works in the office, and his daughters (and their classmates) are often called on to taste-test new varieties. Saulnier himself works on researching and developing new cookies in a cream-colored warehouse corner, while beside him an industrial gravity mixer churns 800 pounds of dough at a time. In another corner, a Play-Doh-like machine cranks out pucks of future cookie. Pumpkin cookies bake in two convection ovens while hairnetted Asian women weigh and hand-pack tubs of my beloved chocolate chunk dough. Once packed, they're shipped straight to stores. The whole operation makes about 250,000 cookies every week, excluding the dough.
I want to stick my fingers in everything.
I ask if he views Girl Scouts as competition—if he longs to make seasonal sweetmeats out of their bones and gristle. Saulier demurs. "We do actually see a little dip in sales when they're out selling," he says.
I ask him what, after 24 years in the cookie business, still excites him enough to try and outsell little girls in uniform. Today, the answer is almonds.
"We just started making toasted almond cookies," he says, explaining that it's a new goal to work more with the nut. "They're really simple but perfect with black coffee or a cappuccino." 
