Wakefield and the Toll House Inn became well known in the area for the great desserts she baked. One day, while making a batch of cookies that called for baker's chocolate, Wakefield found she was out of that particular kind of chocolate, so she chopped up a Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate bar and substituted it, figuring that it would melt into the batter just like the baker's chocolate did. But instead, the semi-sweet chocolate stayed in little pieces, creating the first chocolate chip cookie!

Word spread, and after striking a deal with Wakefield, Nestlé printed her recipe for Toll House Cookies on the back of the yellow bag that the semi-sweet chocolate bar came in. Plus, it started scoring the tops of the bars and added a special tool in the package to help break them into little pieces. In 1939, to make baking Toll House Cookies even easier, the company introduced the chocolate chip, still in that familiar yellow bag with Wakefield's recipe on the back.

Girlawhirl still uses the famous Toll House recipe when she makes chocolate chip cookies, but these days, in addition to some organic substitutions and even some whole wheat flour for a nutritional boost, she loves to experiment with all the fun chips available. Sometimes she uses the Exotic Chocolate Chips, which are more like coins or discs, from Vosges Chocolates, which come in flavors like spicy Red Fire, and ginger and wasabi infused Black Pearl.

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