A FRESHLY BAKED chocolate chip cookie is everything a Chips Ahoy! isn't: warm and inviting with the smell of browned butter, dotted with melty pockets of chocolate, golden brown around the edges but still soft in the middle. And chocolate chip cookies are beautifully idiot-proof: all you really need is the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag. Even notoriously fussy epicure Jeffrey Steingarten agrees with this, as he points out in his recent book of food essays, It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything. But if this is the case, Steingarten asks, why are so many of the chocolate chip cookies sold in bakeries and restaurants so bad? Too hard, too sweet, too effete, not enough chocolate ... you could say it's the same with Hollywood. Everyone knows what makes a good story: engaging characters, narrative thrust, believable dialogue, cool outfits. So why do we end up every summer with brain-sucking trash that's too dumb even to be campy?

Luckily, however, there are alternatives: live theater and homemade cookies. If Nigella Lawson and Sandra Bernhard got elbow-deep in butter and sugar together, the result might bake up into comedian Heather Gold's new show I Look like an Egg, but I Identify as a Cookie. Performing every Sunday and Monday night in July (starting July 13) at hot Mission restaurant Chez Spencer, Gold will have more than just snappy observations about gender, sexuality, and seventh grade to offer her audience: she'll have a generous batch of hot-from-the-oven cookies to share at the end of the show.

"I spend a lot of time in my kitchen, baking and riffing for my guy friends," Gold says, and much of that sugar-fueled chat ends up as material for her shows. "It seems to cut out the neuroses – I can feel like I'm being productive at the same time." The comforting ritual of the recipe – dry, wet, mix, form, bake – turned into the structure of the show. "I like to think of it as an intellectual burlesque that gets more and more personal as the show goes on. In fact, the original title was Live Naked Truth. Dividing the show into the recipe's five parts, Gold says, provided "a structure that would let me involve the audience in a fresh way each night without relying on complete improv." Thus, a monologue about a childhood spent in a tight-knit Jewish community in Niagara Falls, Canada, leads to a back-and-forth with the audience about favorite recipes and family cooking secrets. "Baking is this safe, wonderful thing that brings people together, which means I can also be talking about this potent, political stuff at the same time." Which she does, skewering heterosexuality ("Dry"), lesbianism ("Wet"), the left ("Mix"), and junior high ("Bake"). During the "Mix" section, for example, the bowl of cookie dough goes out into the audience for stirring. Given that 9 out of 10 people would rather eat cookie dough than cookies, isn't she worried about the bowl coming back empty? "Well, it becomes a community issue. It puts everyone in it together – I tell the group, if you're going to stick your hands in the bowl, the whole audience is going to have to deal with that."

But just how do you bake enough cookies for 45 people every night while also taking on Berkeley politics, queer lingo, and the famous secret honey cake of Niagara Falls? "Originally, I had a vision of 20 Easy-Bake Ovens. But, you know, you have to use their mixes, and the light bulbs ... well, I ended up using three toaster ovens for the first workshops at the Jon Sims Center. The room got really hot, but everyone was surrounded by the smell of baking cookies." This time around, Gold's cookies will be baking in a huge wood-fired brick oven at the center of the space. It's the same oven custom-built by baker Elizabeth Falkner, owner of Citizen Cake, when she first started her bakery in this former auto body shop. (Falkner, who now runs the second incarnation of Citizen Cake on the corner of Grove and Hyde Streets, will be returning as a special guest on the show's opening night.)

As in comedy, the best moments of cooking are the unscripted ones. Julia Child, who filmed her public-television cooking shows live, was notorious for her breezy on-camera saves. "Remember, you're the only one in the kitchen," she was known to say as thousands watched her soufflé fall or her quenelles disintegrate. "I've never done the same show twice," Gold says. "When I first started doing the workshops, I had three guys as my assistants who would do all the mixing and chopping. One night we completely forgot about the eggs – I had to send one of the guys out to buy a carton of eggs in the middle of the performance. Afterward, the audience really wanted me to keep that in the show. It was everyone's favorite part!"

After the show the restaurant's bar opens, and the audience (and Gold) can mix and mingle, cookies in hand. "I've been really getting more interested in food lately: eating local, learning more about organics, going for what's fresh, not packaged and canned. Just like comedy!"

Heather's Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup pecans

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 cup (two sticks) butter, softened

¾ cup brown sugar, packed

¾ cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

¾ cup chocolate chips (about ¾ of a standard 6 oz. bag)