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After finishing the Blender tutorial, I tried this out. I do not know if it is good or not, and I need criticism and advice. I have discovered I actually love creating, and I want to get really good in Blender. But I am an absolute beginner firstly.
How do I get a good-looking cookie?
The chocolate chips are too round and uniform. On a real cookie, the chocolate chips generally start out as straight-edged shapes which then get melted when the cookie is baked. This leaves them as fairly irregular shapes. Also, the chocolate chips do not protrude far above the cookie's surface; they are embedded in it.
To fix, I'd recommend sculpting in some irregularities and maybe some slight noise textures for variation in bump and roughness. Take a look at a photo of a real cookie (or even better, a real cookie) to see how the chips should be positioned. You may have to model or sculpt some indentations in the cookie's surface for them to fit in.
The surface is too smooth. Cookies have a lot of irregularities in the surface. Look at any cookie and you'll see that the surface is very irregular, even for factory-made cookies. Look even close and you'll notice tiny cracks and bubbles in the baked dough.
To fix this, make sure the cookie material has at the very least a noise texture driving the bump. Better yet, add more (different) noise for displacement and bump. The roughness is important, and it depends on what kind of cookie it is. Is it a really greasy cookie? An old, dry, stale cookie?
For the base color, see what colors your reference uses and try to replicate those as closely as possible. Use sculpting and Displace Modifiers to make the surface uneven and lumpy. If it's a really high-detail cookie, sculpt in some tiny cracks and other irregularities.
Tiny details will really sell the realism. You need to think of tiny details, the kind of details that no one ever notices. These will really help push your model toward realism.
For example, cookies are messy. They make a lot of crumbs. You could scatter some tiny crumbs across the surface of the cookie and on the table around it. Or maybe there's some little chunks missing from the side of the cookie. A tiny burn mark from the oven or a chocolate smear where it rubbed against another cookie. The kind of thing that no one ever notices until it's not there.
In my opinion a good thing to do is to give a mix of tiny and bigger noises to the material so that it creates a kind of grainy texture on the surface. Use a Color > MixColor in Multiply mode in order to mix. You can also mix with a gradient on Z so that the bottom seems a bit more cooked. Also you create some bumps and even subdivide and sculpt a bit:
With the Dyntopo activated you can dig some cracks:
