The Booze Plays Top Banana: Rum Cake

Having an almost-full bottle of créme de banana on my hands (after buying it to make banana pudding), I looked around for other recipes where I might be able to put it to use. I'm not particularly fond of setting things on fire, so bananas foster was out. I decided to try a recipe for Rum Cake from Southern Living that calls for both rum and banana liqueur.

This cake is straightforward; it's made with butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, lemon zest, dark rum, banana liqueur, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and whipping cream. You bake the batter in a bundt pan, and while the cake is warm and still in the pan, you apply a syrup of made from butter, sugar, rum, and banana liqueur that have been cooked and reduced. I think I cooked my syrup too long, because it crystallized and became grainy and opaque. I poured it on the cake anyway, even though it just hardened on the surface of the cake and didn't get absorbed.

Even though the crystallized syrup wasn't very attractive, it also wasn't too noticeable, since it was on the bottom of the cake. The sliced cake is pretty, with bright flecks of lemon zest throughout. The cake is dense, moist, and delicious. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this cake, because I really dislike the flavor of rum (rum raisin is the only flavor of ice cream that I won't touch with a ten-foot pole). While you can taste the rum, the banana and lemon flavors are equally prominent. My favorite part of the cake was the bottom with the crystallized syrup, since it had the strongest banana flavor.

If you happen to have a bottle of banana liqueur sitting around, I highly recommend making this cake. If you don't have any banana liqueur on hand, this cake might make it worth your while to go out and get some!

Recipe: "Rum Cake," from Three Guys from Miami Cook Cuban, printed in Southern Living, November 2005.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Caramel Popcorn with Peanuts and Chocolate

I made this popcorn back in December when I was trying to find a caramel popcorn recipe to serve at our holiday party. While this popcorn is both beautiful and delicious, I ultimately went with a different recipe for the party, because it's a pain to have to temper the chocolate, and the chocolate makes this popcorn messy to eat. You can read my previous post about this recipe here.

Recipe: "Caramel Popcorn with Peanuts and Chocolate," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "Break Out the Holiday Tins: Caramel Popcorn with Peanuts and Chocolate," December 10, 2011.
• "More Bacon Makes Everything Better: Bacon and Cashew Caramel Corn," December 24, 2011.

Got Egg Whites?: Lime Angel Food Cake with Lime Glaze and Pistachios

After I made a double batch of banana pudding for Mardi Gras, I had an extra 10 egg whites on hand, and angel food cake seemed like the natural choice to use them up. I have a reliable recipe that I love -- "Espresso chocolate chip angel food cake" from Four-Star Desserts by Emily Luchetti. But on a whim, I thought I'd look around to see if there might be another angel food cake recipe I might want to try. A quick search on epicurious.com turned up a recipe for "Lime Angel Food Cake with Lime Glaze and Pistachios," by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. As Lewis and Poliafito are the authors of two of my favorite cookbooks -- Baked and Baked Explorations -- I was eager to give the recipe a try.

The cake recipe calls for egg whites, vanilla, lime zest, cream of tartar, sugar, cake flour, and salt. The recipe is quite specific that you should not grease your angel food pan and you should not use a non-stick pan. This is because the cake is cooled upside down, and you don't want the cake to fall out of the pan while it's cooling. The only angel food pan I have is non-stick, and I went ahead to use it. I wasn't too concerned; after all, non-stick pans are usually not completely "non-stick" per se, but more like "less-stick." The non-stick pan worked out just fine. I was able to cool my cake upside down without a problem, and I still had to run a knife around the cake to release it from the pan after it was cool.

After the cake is cooled, you brush on a syrup of sugar dissolved in lime juice, and then sprinkle on chopped pistachios, which stick to the glaze. This was a pretty messy process (since you have to press the pistachios into the cake so that they stick to the syrup, especially on the sides), and in the future, I would probably apply the syrup and pistachios to only one section of the cake at a time, so that the remaining cake stayed dry and easier to handle without getting the sticky syrup all over my hands. The final step is to drizzle on a glaze of powdered sugar mixed with lime juice.

This angel food cake had the perfect texture -- fluffy and moist, without being wet or sticky. The lime zest in the batter gave the cake a lovely light lime flavor, and the crust of the cake with the lime syrup and pistachios was extra delicious and crunchy (although I think that that lime glaze on top of all that might be been overkill). This cake is a refreshingly unusual and delicious variation on typical angel food cake, and it received rave reviews from tasters. I can't wait to make this cake again.

Recipe: "Lime Angel Food Cake with Lime Glaze and Pistachios," from epicurious.com.

DamGood Indeed: Banana Pudding with Vanilla Wafer Crumble

I wanted to make some sort of dessert for Mardi Gras, but I just couldn't motivate myself to make a king cake. Yeasted breads aren't really my thing to begin with, but I've also never found king cake to be all that appealing. I decided it was time to consult DamGoodSweet, a cookbook of New Orleans-inspired desserts that has been sitting unused on my shelf since I bought it a couple of years ago. It's authored by David Guas, who formerly served as executive pastry chef at the D.C. restaurants Arcadiana, Ceiba, DC Coast, and the recently-closed TenPenh.

I decided to try Guas' recipe for Banana Pudding with Vanilla Wafer Crumble. I have always loved banana pudding -- after all, what's not to like? I love pudding, bananas, and Nilla Wafers. The banana pudding I'm used to is comprised of vanilla pudding with sliced bananas, whole vanilla wafers, and whipped cream. The DamGoodSweet version is banana pudding with sliced bananas and a crumble made from toasted crumbled vanilla wafers and cinnamon.

You make the pudding from egg yolks, sugar, cornstarch, salt, milk, banana liqueur or banana flavoring (I used Dekuyper créme de banana), vanilla, and butter. While I normally put all cooked custards through a sieve, the pudding came out perfectly smooth and I didn't need to strain it. After chilling, the pudding was nicely firm, but still very creamy after stirring.

The crumble that tops the pudding is made from a mixture of crushed vanilla wafers, sugar, cinnamon, and butter; you bake it in the oven so that the wafer bits come out toasted and golden. To serve the pudding, I put some sliced bananas in the bottom of cups (I used small 5 ounce cups, as I was taking these to work and wanted to keep the serving sizes manageable), and topped them with pudding, into which I had folded some extra chopped banana. Right before serving, I spooned on the vanilla wafer crumble.

I love this pudding. This dish delivers a lot more flavor than a typical banana pudding made with vanilla pudding and plain vanilla wafers; the banana flavor in the pudding itself, and the toasted wafers and cinnamon in the crumble make this version special. Plus, the crumble stays nice and crunchy, especially if you sprinkle it on right before serving. I would say that the pudding overall is a bit on the sweet side (I don't see a need for whipped cream here), but I didn't mind. Tom commented that this dessert is a bit simple. I don't disagree; it is only pudding, after all -- but it is definitely the best banana pudding I've ever had!

Recipe: "Banana Pudding with Vanilla Wafer Crumble," from DamGoodSweet: Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth, New Orleans Style, by David Guas and Raquel Pelzel.

A New Recipe That Seems Awfully Familiar: Zingerman's Whoopie Pies

Recently, I had a disappointing experience with the chocolate whoopie pie recipe from Baked Explorations. But just a couple of days later, I noticed that the online version of the New York Times had a slideshow of Valentine's Day desserts, and one of them was a whoopie pie recipe adapted from Zingerman's Bakehouse. I have a distinct memory of seeing this recipe and reading the accompanying article when they were published in 2009, but for the life of me, I'm not sure why I didn't try the recipe back then. It must have escaped my attention that the recipe is from Zingerman's. I have the greatest respect for the Zingerman's empire, and when I saw the recipe again in the slideshow, I knew I had to give it a try.

You can put together the batter in just a few minutes. You cream together room temperature butter and brown sugar, add an egg and vanilla, and then alternately add buttermilk and the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt). The batter was nice and thick and kept its shape when scooped (the recipe says to scoop out 1/4 cup mounds of batter, but I didn't want to make enormous pies, so I used a #24 scoop, and I was able to get 12 smaller pies that were 3.5 inches in diameter).

The cakes baked up into nice little domes that I consider to be the ideal whoopie pie shape. The cakes were tender, chocolately, and very moist -- Tom tried one and said it was at least twice as good as the chocolate cake from the Baked Explorations whoopie pie. I absolutely agree; this cake was perfect. It tasted awfully familiar, so I shouldn't have been surprised when I checked it against my standard whoopie pie recipe from epicurious, it turns out that the cake recipes are identical.

The filling is a swiss buttercream made from egg whites, sugar, butter, vanilla, and salt. The filling is almost identical to the filling for the Baked Explorations whoopie pies. (I should mention, however, that although the Zingerman's recipe says to whisk and heat the egg whites and sugar in a double boiler to 180 degrees, I only took them to about 165 degrees; that is high enough for food safety purposes, and I could smell the egg whites starting to cook and didn't want to risk heating them any further.)

So I guess the Zingerman's whoopie pie recipe isn't new to me after all, but simply a new combination of different chocolate cake and filling recipes that I've tried separately before. I can't decide if I like the buttercream filling or the marshmallow filling (the epicurious recipe has a marshmallow filling) better with these pies -- both are good. But I definitely know which cake recipe I'm sticking with!

Recipe: "Whoopie Pies," adapted from Zingerman's Bakehouse, printed in the March 18, 2009 New York Times.

Previous Posts:

• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Whoopie Pies," February 12, 2012.
• "Whoopie!," September 1, 2008.

Mind the Gaps: Fraisier

When our friends Jim and Colleen recently has us over for dinner, I wanted to bring something different than the usual chocolate cake. Since I'm still looking for ways to use my newly-acquired cake ring, I decided to try Jacques Torres' Fraisier recipe from Dessert Circus, one of the two companion cookbooks to the public television series of the same name. While "fraise" means "strawberry" in French, Torres also adds raspberries to his cake.

The two main components of this cake are a sponge cake ("biscuit") and a raspberry buttercream.  To make the biscuit, you whip six egg whites with sugar until stiff, fold in eight egg yolks, and then fold in flour. You put the batter in a pastry bag and pipe out spirals on parchment paper to form the cake rounds. You sprinkle on a bit of powdered sugar before putting them in an oven so that a nice crust will form during baking. The cakes bake quickly (6-10 minutes) at high temperature (400 degrees). I ended up making the cakes twice, because the first time I made two errors: I overbeat the egg whites, and I forgot to sprinkle on the powdered sugar before baking (and now I know that omitting the powdered sugar results in a sticky top crust, instead of a nice dry crust).  

The cookbook offers two choices of basic buttercream recipes. The first includes 1 egg, 5 egg yolks, water, sugar, and over 3 cups of butter. The second calls for water, sugar, 5 egg whites, and 2 and 1/4 cups of butter. I went with the latter, both because it used less butter, and because I already had 4 extra egg whites on hand (from making two batches of the biscuit batter, since each batch produces two extra whites). To make "Basic Buttercream 2," you beat the egg whites until foamy, beat in a sugar syrup that has been heated to 250 degrees, and continue mixing until the meringue is no longer hot. Then you incorporate the butter all at once and whip until the buttercream is smooth and shiny, about 10 minutes. For this cake you fold 3/4 cup raspberry jam (a recipe is provided, but let's get real, I used store bought jam) into the buttercream.

To assemble the fraisier, you line the outside of the cake ring with some sliced strawberries, and then put a round of cake (trimmed so that it is smaller than the cake ring, and will fit inside the strawberries with some room to spare) on the bottom. You then fill the space between the cake and the strawberries with buttercream. The recipe instructs you to use a pastry bag, but I was a bit lazy and used an offset spatula; as a result, my buttercream was a little messy and left gaps everywhere. You brush the cake layer with raspberry simple syrup (made from sugar, raspberries, and water that have been cooked, strained, and cooled), and then cover it with a layer of buttercream and strawberries or raspberries. On top of that, you add another cake layer, brush it with syrup, and then cover it with more buttercream. Finally, you top the cake with more sliced strawberries. After you chill the cake, you unmold the cake from the ring, and you should end up with a nice cake covered in smooth buttercream. My failure to use a pastry bag resulted in all sort of nooks and crannies in the buttercream. Lesson learned -- next time, I will be much more diligent about minding the gaps and making sure I get full buttercream coverage.

The cake portion of the fraisier is a firm, delicious sponge -- it tastes exactly like the birthday cake my mother used to make for me growing up. The cake is a little dry, however, and it does need the syrup to help keep it moist. I scrimped a little with the raspberry syrup, because I didn't want the cakes to get too soggy -- but in retrospect, I wish I had used a lot more. The raspberry buttercream is incredible -- rich and smooth (but non-greasy), it's like raspberry butter. I also wished that I had used an offset spatula to even out my cake batter before baking. Since I piped the batter out into spirals using a pastry bag, the cakes were not level, and I didn't want to level the cakes after baking since the top crust was so nice.

Nonetheless, this was a lovely, delicious dessert, and it's an amazing way to showcase berries. I look forward to making this again, especially in summer, during strawberry season!

Recipes: "Fraisier," "Biscuit," and "Basic Buttercream 2," from Dessert Circus: Extraordinary Desserts You Can Make at Home, by Jacques Torres.

A Little Brittle Goes a Long Way: Peanut Butter Cookies

I'm still working my way through the easy recipes in Christina Tosi's Momofuku Milk Bar. Her recipe for peanut butter cookies seemed like some low-hanging fruit -- it's just a peanut butter cookie that includes pieces of peanut brittle (the recipe is in the chapter titled "nut brittle").

The peanut brittle is straightforward. You melt a cup of sugar in a dry pan, cook it until it is a deep amber color, add peanuts, and the dump the mixture out onto a silpat to cool. You chop the cooled brittle, or grind it in the food processor, into pieces the size of short-grain rice.

The method for these cookies is similar to that for the chocolate-chocolate cookies, although Tosi explains that this recipe doesn't require the full 10 minutes of creaming because of the presence of peanut butter, which is a great emulsifier. You cream together butter, sugar, and glucose for 2-3 minutes, and then beat for another 3 minutes after adding peanut butter, eggs, and vanilla. Finally, you add the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt) and the peanut brittle. You scoop out the cookies (I used a #12 scoop and got 14 cookies from the batch), flatten the tops of the scoops, and then refrigerate the cookies for at least an hour before baking.

The recipe says that the cookies should bake for 18 minutes, but my first batch came out burnt around the edges; subsequent batches were nicely browned in 17 minutes and probably could have been taken out of the oven even a bit earlier. The cookies had little specks of golden melted brittle visible throughout, and they spread quite a bit, ending up 4.5 inches in diameter. There were also tiny bits of peanut in the cookies -- part of the chopped brittle -- even though I used smooth peanut butter.

These cookies were moist and very chewy. I would have liked bigger pieces of peanut or more texture in general. The brittle is not crunchy in the final cookie -- I don't know if this is because they melted into the cookie dough, or because the pieces of brittle were so small to begin with. I think I would have preferred the cookies with chunky peanut butter, or perhaps larger pieces of brittle (although I am leery to try the latter since the recipe includes a warning, "Make sure your brittle is ground down to the size of short-grain rice or the consistency and texture of your cookie will be off."). But they are definitely quite tasty. I would happily make these again, the next time I'm in the mood for a monster-sized peanut butter cookie!

Recipe: "Peanut Butter Cookies" from Momofuku Milk Bar, by Christina Tosi.

Previous Post: "Magic Doesn't Just Bake Itself In an Oven: Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies," February 3, 2012.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Emily's Cake

For dearest Emily -- with love and appreciation from your many friends and colleagues. Warmest wishes to you in your retirement!

Recipe: "Stump de Noël," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.  Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Post: "Baked Sunday Mornings: Stump de Noël," January 1, 2012.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Chocolate Whoopie Pies

I don't know what it is, but I am just not feeling this week's Baked Sunday Mornings assignment, Chocolate Whoopie Pies. I love whoopie pies as much as the next person, but these just did not turn out the way I had hoped.

The first time I made this recipe, it was a total disaster. The first step in the recipe is to dissolve instant espresso powder and cocoa powder in hot water and hot coffee. Then you add brown sugar and vegetable oil, followed by an egg, vanilla, and buttermilk, and then finally the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda). I ended up with so much liquid in comparison to the dry ingredients that my batter was very thin, and there were clumps of flour that I was having difficulty incorporating. I decided to try baking a few cookies anyway, and they ended up very flat.

I tried the recipe again, this time omitting the hot water in the recipe to reduce the amount of liquid. The batter was still quite thin, thinner than I am used to with whoopie pies. To my mind, each half of a whoopie pie should be domed like a little cake, not flat like a cookie. My cookies still ended up flatter than I would have liked, but they had a nice flavor -- richly chocolate, with strong notes of coffee and espresso. The cookies were not as moist or tender as I would have liked; I assume this is related to the fact that they were so flat. I used a #24 scoop and ended up with 32 cookies that were three and a half inches in diameter.

The filling (egg whites, sugar, butter, vanilla, and salt) was very rich and creamy, and quite sweet -- the flavor was very close to the filling of an Oreo. I thought it complemented the cookies nicely. I think the majority of the bakers in the Baked Sunday Mornings group had no problem getting nicely domed cookies, so I'll willing to concede that my suboptimal results may be due to baker error. Regardless, I gave the recipe two chances and I think that's enough -- although I enjoyed the red velvet whoopie pie recipe from Baked Explorations, I'm just not a fan of the chocolate version. And since I already have another chocolate whoopie pie recipe that produces wonderful results, I'll stick with that one.

Recipe: "Chocolate Whoopie Pies" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Red Velvet Whoopie Pies," February 13, 2011.
• "A Bit of Holiday Sparkle: The Gingerbread Whoopie Pie," December 1, 2009.
• "Baby Shower Baked Goods," October 8, 2008.
• "Whoopie!," September 1, 2008.

Ask and You Shall Receive: Key Lime Pie

For quite some time now, someone I know professionally has been goading me to make him his favorite dessert, a key lime pie. Every time I happen to speak to him on the phone or see him in person, he starts out the conversion by asking when he will get his pie. Since this person was coming to our office for a meeting a few days ago, I decided it was finally time to deliver on his key lime pie.

Key lime pie is not in my regular rotation of baked goods (if you read this blog regularly, you know that I almost never make pies). I searched around for a recipe, and most were quite similar. I decided to go with a recipe from epicurious that was adapted from Town Hall Restaurant in San Francisco. I chose this recipe because it is basically a traditional key lime pie, but the crust is a bit distinctive due to the addition of almonds.

This recipe contains only a few ingredients and requires just a few minutes to prepare. You make the crust by grinding together graham crackers, sugar, and almonds in the food processor, and then adding melted butter. I should note that the recipe calls for seven graham crackers that are 5 inches by 2.5 inches. The Honey Maid graham crackers I bought were slightly smaller than this size. I don't know what the "standard size" of a graham cracker is -- but one thing that would be quite helpful for a recipe like this is a weight measure for the graham crackers, or a volume measure for the amount of crumbs you need. After all, one of these measurements should be provided in case you want to use homemade graham crackers. I threw in an extra graham cracker to compensate for the smaller size, and I weighed my eight crackers so that I would have a measurement for future reference (125 grams). The crust mixture was the perfect consistency. It was easy to press into the pan and I used a tart tamper to make the crust even and tight. The recipe instructs you to use a 9-inch pie plate, but there was definitely enough crust mixture to make a 10-inch pie.

The filling is simply a mixture of egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk, key lime juice (I used Nellie & Joe's bottled juice), and key lime zest (I used finely chopped zest from a persian lime). You bake the crust separately, cool it, pour in the filling, and bake the filled pie.

After the pie was cooled and chilled overnight, I piped on some lightly sweetened whipped cream. I was very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to cut clean slices. The crust held together well, and the filling kept its shape. I thought that this pie was delicious. The crust is quite sweet, but the filling is quite tart -- together, they complement each other very nicely. The almonds in the crust do make the pie a bit more interesting. When Tom tasted the crust mixture alone, he said it tasted a lot like Golden Grahams cereal. I think the whipped cream is not at all necessary from a taste perspective -- the key lime flavor of the filling is so strong that it pretty much drowns out the whipped cream (although I didn't use that much whipped cream, so perhaps this would change if the ratios were different). But the whipped cream does make an attractive garnish, so I still think it's a good addition.

All in all, this was a delicious dessert that was very easy to make. I would definitely recommend the recipe to anyone looking for a key lime fix, or just a delicious tart dessert!

Recipe: "Key Lime Pie," adapted from Town Hall Restaurant, on epicurious.com.

Previous Post: "Key Lime Sugar Cookies," August 15, 2008.

This Cookie Can't Be Too Thin or Too Rich: Milk's Molasses Cookies

When I saw a cookie recipe in last week's Culinary SOS column in the Los Angeles Times, I of course wanted to give it a try as soon as possible. The recipe was for molasses cookies, from Milk, described as "thin and rich, so have a big glass of milk at the ready — it's all but impossible to eat just one." It happens that three years ago, I was a little disappointed with another Culinary SOS recipe from Milk, for "ooey-gooey double-chocolate cookies." But I can never resist the call of Culinary SOS.

The recipe is no fuss -- you cream together butter and sugar, add eggs, beat in molasses, and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ground ginger, salt, and cloves). You can bake the cookies right away, with no need to chill the batter. The recipe instructs you to use 2 tablespoons of batter for each cookie, so I used a #30 scoop. These cookies spread and flatten considerably during baking -- my finished cookies were four inches across and only 1/4 inch high.

The article mentions that at Milk, the cookies are garnished with a sugar glaze, and I had intended to do the same. I was planning to make a hard glaze from a mixture of King Arthur glazing sugar and water, and to drizzle it over the cookies so they would look like the ones in the photo accompanying the L.A. Times article. However, I ended up baking these cookies late into the night, and by the time I was finished, I was just too exhausted to make the glaze. The recipe says it yields two dozen cookies per batch, and I got 64 from my double batch. But since the cookies were so large, I could only fit six cookies on a cookie sheet, and as I never put more than one tray of cookies in the oven at a time, I could only bake six cookies every 18 minutes. After my three hours and 18 minutes of baking, I just called it a night and left the cookies plain.

These cookies didn't need a glaze, in any case. They baked up perfectly round and uniform. The outer edges of the cookies were crisp, and the centers were superchewy -- the texture is quite special, and I found it to be addictive. The molasses-spice flavor was terrific as well. Even Alexander was a big fan, declaring these cookies to be "very good!," and I couldn't agree more. These cookies are excellent, and I think this will be my go-to spice cookie from now on.

Recipe: "Molasses Cookies" from Milk, recipe available in the January 26, 2012 Los Angeles Times.

Previous Post: "Ooey-Gooey? Phooey!," January 30, 2009.

Magic Doesn't Just Bake Itself In an Oven: Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies

My cousin gave me a copy of Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi for my birthday a couple of months ago, but I procrastinated a bit before trying out any of the recipes; I was still smarting from my repeated failed attempts (see here and here) to make Tosi's compost cookies. I have successfully made Tosi's famed crack pie and her cereal-milk panna cotta, but this cookbook is filled with fairly complicated recipes that are a bit intimidating. It is not for the faint of heart, and I would certainly not recommend it for beginning bakers.

I decided to start with one of the simplest recipes in the cookbook, "chocolate-chocolate cookies." Tosi describes these cookies as an ode to the fudgy brownie. While I would normally expect a "chocolate-chocolate" cookie to have chocolate chips or chunks in chocolate batter, this cookie has chocolate crumbs in chocolate batter. There is an entire chapter in the cookbook called "the crumb" which includes recipes for different types of crumbs (milk crumb, berry milk crumb, malted milk crumb, chocolate crumb, birthday cake crumb, pie crumb), and the various baked goods that include crumbs as a component. To make the chocolate crumbs, you mix together flour, cornstarch, sugar, cocoa powder, salt, and melted butter until the mixture comes together in small clusters. You spread the clusters on a parchment or Silpat-lined pan and bake them for a bit; they dry out and harden as they cool. (Watch a video of Tosi making the crumbs and some recipes that use them, including these cookies, here.)

To make the cookies, you cream together butter, glucose, and sugar for 2-3 minutes, and then beat the mixture for another 7-8 minutes after adding egg, vanilla, and melted chocolate. Then you mix in flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and the chocolate crumbs. I followed the mixing directions exactly; there is an entire section in the "techniques" chapter of the cookbook entitled, "the ten-minute creaming process, or why milk bar cookies taste so damn good." The cookbook states that, "In order to achieve the improbable crispy-on-the-outside, fudgy-and-slightly-underbaked-in-the-center defining texture of a Milk Bar cookie -- defying science and gravity -- a serious creaming process is required. I will go so far as to say it is the most important step in making a Milk Bar cookie..." (emphasis in original). After explaining the science behind the creaming process, the section concludes with, "Take this process seriously. Magic doesn't just bake itself in an oven. You can certainly make delicious cookies even without a mixer, melting the butter and mixing the dough with a wooden spoon. But not these cookies." So I set my kitchen timer and made sure that I got in my full 10 minutes of mixing.

After you make the dough, you scoop it out, flatten the scoops a bit, and then refrigerate the cookies before baking. The recipe instructs you to use a 2 and 3/4 ounce scoop, which would be a #12 scoop. I thought that seemed excessively large, so I used a #24 scoop instead. I got exactly 26 cookies from each batch of dough using the smaller scoop.

Because I made my cookies smaller than suggested, I was unsure how long the baking time should be (the recipe says 18 minutes for the larger cookies). As the recipe states, "It's tough (kind of impossible) to gauge if a cookie that is this dark with chocolate is done." I made a guess and baked the cookies for 13 minutes. They were still not set in the center when I pulled them out, but they firmed up upon cooling.

When sampling the raw dough, you could definitely detect the sandy texture of the chocolate crumbs; this texture seemed to be lost during baking. However, these cookies have a very deep chocolate flavor. They taste like they have some espresso in them, even though they don't. In the future, I would reduce the baking time by a minute or two, because I think my cookies were a little overdone, as they were more crisp than chewy. I would also like to try this recipe again making the cookies with a #12 scoop, because I suspect that the larger size cookies may also have a better texture. (There are definitely some cookies where the size of the cookie affects the texture; Jacques Torres' salted chocolate chip cookie recipe is one of them. You can read here about why big cookies offer the possibility of having multiple textures in the same cookie.)

This was still a very good, very chocolately cookie. It was definitely not the best chocolate cookie I've ever had -- but I want to give it another try. I should have just followed the directions with regard to cookie size and baking times. I think that improvising is a bad idea with these recipes -- after all, magic doesn't just bake itself in an oven!

Recipe: "Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies," from Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi; recipe available here at bonappetit.com, or here (along with a video of Christina showing how to make them) on the Today Show website.