It all began with a conversation with ‘mouse. I’m not sure who brought up the topic of chocolate chip cookies first, but I know that I’d had them on the brain the day I went through my chocolate stash, looking for the remaining bits of a ten-pound slab of Wilbur semisweet chocolate, and found an entire unopened one-pound bag of cappuccino chips from King Arthur Flour. I couldn’t remember what my original plans were for those chips, but I knew that they were destined for cookies, specifically for chocolate cookies. But what sort of chocolate cookies?
Here is where the Cook’s Illustrated-style explication would follow: the definition of what I wanted, the types of recipes available, an analysis of each one to determine why it wouldn’t make the cut, or what features it had that I wanted to retain—but I confess, dear friends, I followed the path of least resistance. It didn’t matter much to me whether it was a soft or a crisp cookie, just as long as it tasted richly of chocolate and coffee. I could have pulled out all my cookbooks, compared and contrasted, but instead I started with that august standard, the Toll House Cookie, and made my changes from there.
Ultimately I did get a crisp, rich and extremely chocolaty cookie, mostly because I’m a stickler about butter. Butter gives chocolate chip cookies unbelievable flavor and color, but it also makes cookie batter spread and thin out, which is perfect if you like your cookies thin and crisp, but an utter bear if you are a fan of the soft, chewy, puffy chocolate chip cookie. The best way to get that sort of cookie is to use a vegetable shortening, like Crisco, which melts at a higher temperature. This means that by default, all of my chocolate chip cookies are of the thin-and-crunchy stripe, because I don’t use Crisco at all, not even in pie crust, nuh-uh, not ever. The world has plenty of representation from commercially-made, trans-fat-shortened cookies; I certainly don’t need to make them at home. (Of course, even as I get high and mighty about trans fats, I am aware that I’m far from a purist on the issue, as the cappuccino chips are made from solid vegetable fat. Mea culpa. Maybe one day I’ll find coffee-flavored chips made from white chocolate, and when I do, I will snap them up in a heartbeat.)
But this is not the time nor the post to parse about trans fats. Even knowing what I know about cookies, even having spent my entire childhood baking Toll House cookies and my entire adulthood finding interesting variations on the theme, I was still surprised by how much I like these. They’re big, they’re crisp, they have just the right amount of coffee hit, and they’re very, very chocolaty. I’d thought I’d need to do some tweaking, but no, I like these just as they are—which is a relief. ‘mouse has asked me if I’m interested in trying another Toll House variant; it’s been a long time since I’ve made Nick Malgieri’s lovely orange-scented chocolate chip cookies, made with milk chocolate chips; and I’ve just found my old copy of Sophie’s Table by Sophie Grigson, which has a recipe for a flourless, oat-based chocolate chip cookie which I’ve only made once, but left me weak-kneed that one time. Obviously I have my work cut out for me, but based on your comments, I doubt this will be taken as unwelcome news. 
Mocha Chip Cookies
makes 45-48 cookies, approximately 3” in diameter
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, gently pliant to the touch
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
1 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 1 teaspoon hot water
2 cups (measured by dip-and-sweep method, about 11 ounces) all-purpose flour
1/4 cup (about 2 ounces) Dutch-processed cocoa powder (I used 2 tablespoons “plain” Dutch cocoa and 2 tablespoons black cocoa from King Arthur Flour, which gives the cookies a nice deep dark color, but it is certainly not a requirement)
1 pound cappuccino chips
Preheat oven to 375F (Gas Mark 4). Position oven racks to upper and lower thirds of oven. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper. (If you have four pans, you can scoop out the cookie dough for the second two pans while the first two pans are baking, meaning you can bake the whole batch in under half an hour. I love it when that happens.)
Using either a hand mixer or a stand mixer with the flat paddle, beat the butter until softened. Add the sugars and beat until light, fluffy and sand-colored. Add the salt and beat in, then add the eggs, one at a time. Scrape the bowl as you need to. Add the almond extract, espresso powder and dissolved baking soda and mix just to incorporate.
In a separate bowl, sift the flour and cocoa together. Add in increments to the wet ingredients and mix gently. The dough will be very stiff. Stir in the chips by hand. It will take some stirring, as the batter is stiff and it will feel like you’ve got too many chips in there, but just stick with it and you’ll get them all mixed in. Drop by tablespoons onto the parchment-lined cookie sheets. (I use a Zeroll #40 cookie/ice cream scoop, which is a bit larger than a tablespoon, and gives me 45 cookies to the batch. You can also make smaller cookies, but keep an eye on them as they bake so they don’t burn.)
Bake two sheets at a time for 12 minutes, reversing the sheets from top to bottom and from front to back after six minutes. They are done when they are dry to the touch and faintly puffy; as they cool, they’ll deflate a bit. Let them rest on the cookie sheets for 1-2 minutes before decanting them to a cooling rack.