What makes the perfect chocolate chip cookie? If you were to ask a group of people, you'd likely receive widely varying results spanning the chewy-crispy-crunchy spectrum. But more importantly, how do you achieve these cookie variants? We set out to demonstrate how, by tweaking one classic chocolate chip cookie recipe, the home baker can create chocolate chip cookies with different textures, flavors and appearances.

We started out with this Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, which yields crispy-on-the-outside, soft-in-the-inside cookies that easily rival some of those tried-and-true store-bought cookies you ate as a child.

The first change we made to the classic recipe was adding flour and subbing in cake flour for the usual all-purpose variety. Just adding flour made the cookies dense and dry, but the cake flour was a surprising hit. The resulting cookies were tender and super chewy with pleasantly caramelized edges.

The second experiment pertained to the chemical leaveners: We replaced the recipe's baking soda with baking powder. The cookies turned out lighter, crumbly and fragile, which wasn't a desired outcome, as voted by our tasting panel.

Next, we adapted the ingredients that give cookies their sweetness and, as it turns out, greatly impact their texture. In lieu of standard room-temperature butter, we tried 3/4 cup of coconut oil and melted butter, respectively. The coconut oil yielded a lighter, less toffee-flavored cookie, which made the chocolate chips taste more pronounced and allowed the coconut flavor of the oil to emerge. Melting the butter produced a crackly topped, slightly chewy cookie.

It was the variation in sugars that resulted in the greatest surprise, though. We tried all brown sugar, all granulated sugar, and a combination of brown sugar and corn syrup (more on that last one later). The all dark brown sugar cookie was tender, cakey and notably darker in color.