Golfer, you would be making a good point in general, but I was using the same oven she did. But you are correct in that different ovens do actually bake differently, even at what appears to be the same temperature.
The chocolate chip recipe comes right off the pack of Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Morsels.I use a pareve Jewish brand of chips, because Nestles is considered dairy. And you HAVE to use the optional nuts in the recipe. Makes all the difference.
As to the challah – there is NO way to give you her recipe, and as I no longer have the specific utensils she used, I can’t even measure out the ingredients the same way. I’ll give you an example. She used a floru sifter as her measure. So she would tell me to take “ah measure und a hef, and den ah FULL measure.” She used a specific large serving spoon to measure out her Kosher salt, and a sugar scoop of a specific size and shape for the sugar. No other scoop was right, and when I mislaid the scoop some years after she died, I enver found one that was the correct proportion. She used “ah bissele oil mit a gantze measure (a different kind) fun heiseh vasser, ober nisht tzu heis.” You see what I mean? Mostly she used two packages of dry yeast. And she put in 4-5 eggs, depending on how much more flour she would add in.
This dough was an all purpose one for savory OR sweet things. She could make the MOST delicious onion rolls from it, after making whatever challahs she needed, or roll it out with cinnamon and some more sugar and raisins and walnuts, and had the very best babka you ever tasted. Mamesh taam Gan Eden, we used to say. Erev Shabbos, you could smell the challah baking from a block away, and that was the aroma greeting me as I returned from school each Friday afternoon. All this talk is making me very nostalgic and a little sad, because no one will ever make challah that does it for me as hers did.