National Chocolate Chip Day is May 15, which might be the most important holiday of the entire month, depending on your priorities. (Mine are: book, blanket, snack. Everything else is negotiable.)

Here’s something I learned that delighted me. The chocolate chip cookie was an accident. In 1938, Ruth Wakefield ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. She was making a batch of chocolate cookies and didn’t have time to melt the baker’s chocolate, so she chopped up a Nestle bar and tossed it in, figuring the pieces would melt into the dough. They didn’t. The chocolate stayed in gooey little pockets. She pulled the sheet out of the oven, shrugged, and served them. Her guests lost their minds.

Nestle eventually bought her recipe for the rights to print it on every bag of chocolate chips forever. Her payment? One dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate. (A dollar. I sincerely hope the chocolate was a LOT of chocolate.)

This story stays with me because it’s the most romance-novel setup imaginable. A woman, convinced she’s failing at the thing she meant to do, accidentally creates something the world falls in love with. Her supposed mistake becomes a household staple. The thing she made outlives her by a century and counting.

Readers know this story in their bones. We meet book after book where the heroine thinks she’s in the middle of a disaster and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to her. The botched plan. The wrong order at the bakery that leads to meeting the guy behind her in line. The recipe that flops at the worst possible moment, before the judge she’s trying to impress.

Food and love are twin engines in the best romances. The meal made for one that becomes a meal for two. The kitchen where two people who shouldn’t be talking end up talking. The cookie that, accidentally, changes everything.

If you want a romance that runs on that exact engine, my Recipes for Love series lives and breathes this. Start with A Taste of Temptation here. Seven books of food, chemistry, and people who had no plan to fall in love.

Happy baking.