Dollop your chocolate chip cookies with cream cheese before baking

Low Risk. Extremely low effort. High reward. There are many, many good paths to a chocolate chip cookie, any number of which can be found on this site already. Add a small scoop of cream cheese to the top of your cookie dough before baking, and bake as usual, perhaps a minute longer. You could, I suppose, cube and freeze chunks of cream cheese to mix into the batter, but that sounds like a lot of work.

This photo is not mine. My cookies were made under cover of darkness and I have no photographic proof because I ate them immediately. I imagine the baker of these cookies did a wheelbarrow more labor in getting them perfect and layered. Perfection is not the goal. The goal is something vaguely like a chocolate chip cheesecake but with the bare minimum of effort.

If you, too, feel the siren call of cream cheese brownies, then give this a gander.