Cookies and Milk Reinvented: Blueberry and Cream Cookies

Continuing my way through the cookie recipes in Momofuku Milk Bar, I reached Christina Tosi's recipe for blueberry and cream cookies. I distinctly remember when this recipe was featured in Bon Appétit in the fall of 2010. I was tempted to try the recipe back then, but I was still a little gun-shy after my repeated failed attempts at Tosi's compost cookies. In retrospect, I'm glad I waited. The version of the recipe in the Milk Bar cookbook is significantly different from the version that appeared in Bon Appétit.

One of the key ingredients in the blueberry and cream cookie is milk crumb. To make the crumbs, you combine dried milk powder, flour, cornstarch, sugar, salt, and melted butter, and toss the mixture until it forms clusters. You toast the clusters in the oven, cool them, toss them with more dried milk powder, and then coat them in white chocolate. (This is the version of the milk crumb recipe in the cookbook; for the version that appeared in Bon Appétit, you stop after toasting the crumbs and don't bother with the additional milk powder and white chocolate.) The crumbs pictured in the cookbook are bright white. Mine were definitely ivory colored; they picked up a bit of color in the oven, and white chocolate is not actually white, after all. The fact that you coat the crumbs in white chocolate means that they hold together well even after you mix them into the batter (you can see them protruding from the cookies in the photo below).

Once you have made your crumbs, you can make the cookie batter, which follows the standard Milk Bar method. You cream together butter, sugar, brown sugar, and glucose for 2-3 minutes, add eggs and beat the mixture for 7-8 additional minutes, add in dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt), and then incorporate the milk crumbs and dried blueberries. The Bon Appétit version of the recipe instructs you to chill the dough for at least 24 hours before baking, but the cookbook version says they only need an hour of chilling, which is what I gave them. I used a #16 scoop and got 20 cookies from a batch of dough.

As with some of the other recipes in the cookbook, I found that the specified baking time of 18 minutes was too long. My cookies were done in 16.5 minutes and turned out wonderfully chewy. Tom says that they taste like a cross between a blueberry muffin and a cookie. One of my colleagues said they taste just like Post Blueberry Morning cereal. It may be a cop out, but I think they taste like blueberries and cream, with a touch of salt. While the milk crumbs are a very interesting and fitting complement to the blueberries (quite frankly, I think they make the cookie), I think they are a bit on the sweet side because of their white chocolate coating. I also think the cookie probably could have used a few more blueberries -- or perhaps I should not have used dried wild blueberries, which are quite small.

But this certainly is a tasty and unusual cookie, and I would happily make it again. (For those of you who are interested in these cookies but want to take a shortcut, blueberry and cream is one of the varieties of Momofuku Milk Bar mixes that you can buy from the Momofuku store or Williams-Sonoma.)

Recipe: "Blueberry and Cream Cookies," from Momofuku Milk Bar, by Christina Tosi. The cookbook version of the recipe is available here on the Good Morning America website; variants are available in other places, such as here and here.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache

This week's assignment for Baked Sunday Mornings is the Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Glaze -- which I think might be my favorite chocolate cake of all time. I first made this cake back in January, and I instantly fell in love. There is nothing not to love about this cake. The cake itself is light, moist, and very chocolatey with a delicate, fine crumb (it's also the same cake used in the Baked grasshopper cake). The coffee buttercream is lusciously smooth, and absolutely delicious. And the chocolate ganache and chocolate-covered espresso beans on top? Gorgeous. This cake is a showstopper.

I made this cake again recently, and I didn't change a thing. Well, I did make a point of trimming the cake a bit when I leveled the layers, because I was taking the cake to work (on the subway) and I wanted to make sure that the cake would fit into a 5-inch tall bakery box. 

The combination of the chocolate cake with the coffee buttercream is divine. This is the type of celebration cake where just having the cake is cause enough for celebration; it's absolute sweet splendor.

Recipe: "Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.  Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "My New Cake Crush: Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache," January 14, 2012.
• "My Cake Has a New Set of Clothes: Grasshopper Cake," January 24, 2012.

They're Magically Delicious!: Compost Cookies 3.0

Two years ago, I tried Christina Tosi's recipe for "Compost Cookies" to disastrous results. Twice. (See here and here.) I vowed never to return to the recipe again, but I recently had a change of heart due to two factors. First, the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook has a version of the compost cookie recipe that is different than the one I tried two years ago. (The recipe I used two years ago was from the Live with Regis and Kelly website, here.) Second, I've had good results with the three cookie recipes I've tried so far from Momofuku Milk Bar (chocolate-chocolate, peanut butter, and corn), so I was optimistic that the revamped compost cookie would also be successful. The cookbook version of the recipe is available at the oprah.com website (here), and you can see that not only does it include weight measurements -- which are always more accurate than volume measurements provided in the previous version I tried -- but also the volume measurements between the two versions of the recipe are different.

I made the cookies right before St. Patrick's day and I wanted to give a small nod to the holiday, so I used Lucky Charms cereal (1.5 cups/55 g total) in place of the butterscotch chips and pretzels. Otherwise, I made the recipe exactly as written, including adding the specified amounts of miniature chocolate chips, graham cracker crust, oats, ground coffee, and potato chips (I used Lay's Kettle Cooked Sea Salt and Cracked Pepper chips). I used a #16 scoop and got 22 cookies from each batch of dough.

My cookies spread and flattened quite a bit during baking, so they ended up fairly thin. They also browned quickly. While the recipe says to bake them for 18 minutes at 375, I found that 15 minutes was the right bake time for me. Even after only 15 minutes, the edges of the cookies were quite dark, although the middle appeared pale and uncooked. But after the carryover cooking out of the oven, the middles were perfectly done.

The cookies had little blobs of bright colors in them from the Lucky Charms marshmallows. When I was a kid, I remember the marshmallow lineup as "pink hearts, orange stars, yellow moons, green clovers, and blue diamonds." I distinctly remember when General Mills added the purple horseshoes, but now there are all sorts of additional marshmallow shapes, including rainbows, blue moons, shooting stars in multiple colors, hourglasses (what is that about?) and red balloons.

These cookies are really good. When I bake, I usually take a single taste and pack up the rest to take to my office. This is the first time in recent memory that I could not stop myself from eating two cookies in a row. They are almost unbelievably chewy, but at the same time have a hearty texture from the oats, cereal, and chips. I would be surprised if many people who tried these would be able to correctly identify the cereal and potato chip components; although you can definitely tell there are crunchy things in the cookie, the flavors of the mix-ins meld together into something that is greater than the sum of their parts. This cookie is immensely satisfying; sweet, salty, chocolately, chewy, and crispy, it met my every expectation and then some!

Recipes: "Compost Cookies" and "Graham Crust" from Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi, recipes available here and here on oprah.com.

Previous Posts:

• "I'm Throwing in the Towel on This One: Compost Cookies 2.0," March 27, 2010.
• "The Name Says It All: Compost Cookies Destined For the Garbage Heap," March 9, 2010.

Accept No Substitutes: Corn Cookies

After successfully making the Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies and Peanut Butter Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar, I decided to move on to Christina Tosi's recipe for Corn Cookies. This recipe is relatively straightforward, in the sense that it doesn't require any sub-components -- like "crunch" or "crumbs" or brittle -- to be prepared separately in advance.

This cookie follows the standard method for making Milk Bar cookies.  You cream together butter and sugar for 2-3 minutes (this recipe does not call for any glucose), add an egg, and then beat the mixture for another 7-8 minutes. You incorporate flour, corn flour, freeze-dried corn powder (made by grinding freeze-dried corn in a blender), baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and then scoop out the cookies and refrigerate them for at least an hour before baking. I used a #16 scoop and got 14 cookies from one batch of dough (the specified yield is 13-15 cookies, so my yield was spot on).

The first time I made this cookie, Whole Foods was out of corn flour, so I bought the next closest thing they had -- masa harina, which is the corn flour made from corn soaked in lime; it's used to make corn tortillas. The resulting cookies tasted (not surprisingly) exactly like a tamale -- which was not horrible, but also not good. (Let me apologize now to everyone in my office for inflicting the masa version of these cookies on you last week.)

Fortunately, when I checked Whole Foods a couple of days ago, they had corn flour back in stock, and I made another batch. They looked identical but were loads better. The second batch of cookies tasted like salted, buttered sweet corn. They have a nice chewy texture that was completely smooth; since there is no corn meal in the cookies, there is no grittiness. The flavor is really unique from anything else I've ever tasted before -- not really comparable to corn bread or corn muffins, but really more like actual corn. The cookies emit a lovely sweet fragrance that is hard to resist. Having been born and raised in the Cornhusker state, I am probably a bigger fan of corn than most -- but these cookies (when properly made with the correct ingredients!) are delicious.

You can now buy box mixes for several varieties of Momofuku Milk Bar cookies -- including corn cookies -- either from the Momofuku online store or from Williams-Sonona.  All of the mixes cost $16 and the corn cookie mix makes 12 cookies. Do yourself a favor and just go out and buy the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. If you make yourself a couple of batches of cookies -- instead of either buying the mix or buying them by mail or in person from Milk Bar, it will pay for itself!

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

Previous Posts:

• "A Little Brittle Goes a Long Way: Peanut Butter Cookies," February 16, 2012.
• "Magic Doesn't Just Bake Itself In an Oven: Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies," February 3, 2012.

This Bombe is Deafening: Frozen Chocolate Oh-Honey So-Fluffy Mousse Bombe

Last weekend Tom and I had some friends over for dinner, and I decided to do something I don't get to do very often -- make a frozen dessert. I've literally been eyeing Marcel Desaulnier's "Frozen Chocolate Oh-Honey So-Fluffy Mousse Bombe" for some time, as there is a photo of this dessert on the front cover of his cookbook Celebrate with Chocolate. The bombe is described as "drop-dead gorgeous; the half a cannonball-like shape enrobed with a honey enhanced chocolate glaze... keeps the secret of the frozen chocolate and pecan mousse interior positioned on the densest chocolate truffle cake imaginable."

There are four components to the bombe: chocolate truffle cake, two kinds of chocolate so-fluffy mousse, and chocolate oh-honey glaze (I didn't make up these names, they're straight from the cookbook!).

The chocolate truffle cake is flourless; it's made with butter, semisweet and unsweetened chocolate, eggs and an egg yolk, and a little sugar. You whip the eggs and egg yolk with the sugar until the mixture is light and thickened, and then fold in the melted butter and chocolates. After you bake the batter in a springform pan, you cool it to room temperature and set it aside until you assemble the bombe.

You make the chocolate so-fluffy mousse by whipping egg whites and then adding in a hot syrup of honey, water, and sugar that has been heated to 240 degrees. You whip the mixture until it's thickened, stir in melted semisweet chocolate, and then fold in heavy cream that has been beat to stiff peaks. You then take a portion of this chocolate honey mousse and mix in more melted chocolate and some pecans to make a chocolate honey pecan mousse.

To assemble the bombe, you spray a bowl that is the same diameter as your truffle cake with some nonstick spray and line it with plastic wrap. Then you put in the chocolate honey mousse, followed by the chocolate honey pecan mousse, followed by the truffle cake layer. You freeze the bombe for at least 6 hours, unmold it, and then cover it with the oh-honey glaze -- which is essentially a ganache made by heating honey, cream, and butter until they come to a boil, pouring them over chopped semisweet chocolate, and stirring until smooth.

I had some issues applying the glaze. The bombe pictured in the cookbook is covered in a flawless and even layer of glaze. But when I poured the warm glaze on the frozen mousse, the glaze hardened almost instantly, making it impossible to get a smooth finish. I actually ended up making a second batch of glaze to see if I could smooth the exterior a bit, but the result in the photo above was the best I could manage. You keep the bombe in the freezer until serving.

After we finished eating dinner and cleared the dishes, I took the bombe out of the freezer and brought it to the dining room, so that I could cut and serve it in front of our guests. The bombe was frozen solid. It required tremendous effort to cut slices, even using a large chef's knife I had run under hot water and wiped dry. After I had passed out slices of bombe, the only sound that could be heard was the ear-piercing clangor of flatware thwacking against china as everyone was using all their might to cut off bites of bombe to eat. The force of my spoon caused a chunk of truffle cake to ricochet off my plate and straight into my lap. For several minutes, our dinner conversation continued to be interrupted by the sustained cacophony. It was both hilarious and horrifying.

The good news is that the bombe was delicious. I used Scharffen Berger 62% chocolate instead of semisweet for the cake, mousse, and glaze, because that's what I had on hand.  As a result, the bombe was barely sweet, and deeply chocolate-y.  Notwithstanding their frozen state, the mousses were much lighter than ice cream and melted in my mouth, with the pecans adding a nice bit of texture and flavor. The truffle cake didn't really seem like cake at all. It had a texture that is difficult to describe, resembling a mix between a dense brownie and crumbly chocolate bar, like a Cadbury Flake. I didn't particularly care for the honey glaze, because its pliable texture seemed a little clumsy and I don't think it melded well with the other components -- but it still had a nice bittersweet chocolate-honey flavor.

To me, the best thing about this dessert is that all of the flavors were straightforward and pure, and the bombe presented the same chocolate-honey combination in layers of varying textures. The overall ingredient list is short and simple (10 tablespoons butter, 22 ounces semisweet chocolate, 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, 3 eggs and 2 egg whites, 5 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 cup honey, 2 1/2 cups heavy cream, and 1 1/2 cups pecans), but this recipe lets the ingredients shine through.

Recipe: "Frozen Chocolate Oh-Honey So-Fluffy Mousse Bombe," from Celebrate with Chocolate: Totally Over-the-Top Recipes, by Marcel Desaulniers.

Putting the "Crack" into Crackers: Rosemary Raisin Pecan Crisps

A few weeks ago, I was walking back to my office after lunch when I ran into a colleague who was also returning to work, after a visit to Cowgirl Creamery. My friend explained that she was addicted to a homemade version of Raincoast Crisps, and that she was buying cheese to go along with the crackers. Tom and I have purchased Raincoast Crisps from Whole Foods before, and they are as delicious as they are expensive.  It seemed implausible that it would be possible to make a comparable homemade version, but I was willing to give it a shot.

The recipe my friend used was developed by Julie Van Rosendaal of DinnerWithJulie.com. It is surprisingly easy. You just stir together flour, baking soda, and salt, add buttermilk, brown sugar, and honey, and then mix in raisins, pecans, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, ground flax, and chopped rosemary. You pour the batter into loaf pans and bake. Once the loaves are cool, you slice them thin and toast the crackers in the oven until they are dark, dry, and crisp (analogous to the method for making biscotti).

I made this recipe exactly as written, except that I used two teaspoons of dried rosemary instead of one tablespoon of fresh. Also, I just let my loaves cool to room temperature before slicing then and I didn't bother putting them into the freezer. It was still very easy to cut the loaves into very thin slices; I got 85 crackers from my two loaves.

These crackers are insanely good. The raw batter has a lot of air bubbles in it, and this creates a lacy texture in the finished cracker; if you hold a cracker up to the light, you can see through parts of it. The crackers are very crisp, hearty, and in my mind, unquestionably as good as real Raincoast Crisps.  The rosemary adds a lovely herbaceous flavor without being too dominating, and my favorite part was the uberchewy golden raisins. It's basically impossible to distinguish the individual flavors of the pecans, pumpkin seeds, and sesame seeds, but all of the components add up to something truly extraordinary. While these crackers are wonderful accompaniments to cheese, they are incredibly tasty on their own. Tom and I both count ourselves as addicts to these little delights -- hence the conclusion that these homemade crisps put the "crack" into crackers. Do yourself a flavor and give these a try; I promise you won't regret it!

Recipe: "Rosemary Raisin Pecan Crisps," from Dinner with Julie.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars

This week's recipe for Baked Sunday Mornings is "Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars." I made these bars last year, so I'm taking the lazy way out and referring back to my previous post about the recipe, here.  

Recipe: "Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "The Easy Way to Emulate a Childhood Classic: Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars," January 3, 2011.
• "A Childhood Delight Reimagined: Chocolate Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Cookies," April 27, 2010.

Yes! We Still Have Bananas!: Double-Banana Pound Cake

Continuing my search for recipes to use up my supply of créme de banana (left over after making banana pudding and rum cake), I came across a Cooking Light recipe for "Double-Banana Pound Cake" that calls for both bananas and banana liqueur. How could I not give it a try?

The cake is straightforward, and I made it exactly as written -- except that I didn't dust my pan with breadcrumbs (I used a non-stick pan and sprayed it with Pam with flour, so I wasn't too concerned about sticking), and I used whole milk instead of non-fat milk (we never have skim milk on hand).

The cake looked terrific -- a beautiful golden crust, a tight crumb, and little bits of banana visible. However, I was disappointed with the cake. While it had a nice strong banana flavor (if a bit on the sweet side), the cake was somewhat rubbery. I can't discount the possibility that I might have overcooked it slightly, but this cake definitely did not have what I would consider to be the ideal "pound cake" texture. The cake wasn't bad, but I don't think it's worth making again.

Recipe: "Double-Banana Pound Cake," from Cooking Light, April 2000.

Telly Monster Would Approve: Hamantaschen

I still remember the first time I tried hamantaschen, at a friend's Purim party in law school (yes, as an Asian woman born and raised in Nebraska, I did not lay eyes on this pastry until I was in my mid-twenties). For years now, I have been meaning to try making my own hamantaschen -- but I always forget to check my calendar to see when Purim is coming up. Until this year! Since I happen to own a copy of The World of Jewish Desserts by Gil Marks, I didn't look any further for a recipe.

The cookie dough is made from butter, sugar, eggs, milk (or orange juice or water), lemon zest (optional), vanilla (or lemon extract or almond extract), flour, baking powder, and salt. After you mix the ingredients into a dough, you need to chill it for several hours before rolling it out and cutting it into three-inch circles. While the dough was still sticky after chilling, it was fairly manageable so long as I kept it well floured during rolling. You put a dollop of filling into the center of each circle of dough, fold up the sides to form a triangle, and bake.

I made both prune and apricot filling, using two variations of the lekvar recipe from The World of Jewish Desserts. Both start with a pound of dried fruit. You soak the fruit in water for two hours, and then simmer the fruit for 30 minutes until it is soft. Then you add sugar (or honey), lemon juice, and lemon zest, process the mixture until smooth, and heat it again until it thickens. The apricot lekvar reminded me a lot of filling from the rosemary apricot bars in Baked Explorations, in terms of its consistency and concentrated flavor.

It took me a while to get a hang of the folding technique for these cookies. I used a #60 scoop for the filling, and it was slightly too much filling for the amount of dough -- but I decided to try and make it work, since using a scoop is so much faster and more precise than spooning on filling freehand. After a few iterations, I worked out a successful technique -- moistening the edges of the dough with water before pinching them together to seal the corners, and then pushing in any bulges (resulting from the overly-generous amount of filling) to straighten out the sides.

I really enjoyed these cookies, and I would definitely make them again. The cookie portion is dry and firm, and the texture is the perfect complement to the filling.  The lemon in the dough and in the filling brings a lovely brightness to the cookie's overall flavor. Between the two varieties, apricot was my favorite -- intensely flavorful and fruity. At the end, I was quite happy that there was so much filling in the cookies, since the fillings were so tasty.

My intense focus on forming my hamantaschen into nice triangles with closed corners and straight sides made me think of Telly Monster from Sesame Street. For those of you who grew up with the show (or watch it with your children), you know that Telly loves triangles; he's a member of the Triangle Lovers' Club, led by the Grand High Triangle Lover. If the Sesame Street Triangle Lovers don't serve hamantaschen at their meetings, they definitely should!

Recipes: "Hamantaschen" and "Prune Lekvar," from The World of Jewish Desserts by Gil Marks.

Lavish Us with Lemon: Sam's Glazed Lavish Lemon Cookies

The other day I was looking for a way to use up some lemons, and I decided to try Carole Walter's recipe for "Sam's Glazed Lavish Lemon Cookies" from Great Cookies. These are large lemon butter cookies (the recipe is in the chapter of the book titled "Big Boys") with a lemon glaze.

The lemon cookie dough is easy to make (cream together butter and lemon zest, add sugar, egg yolks, lemon juice and vanilla, and then add all-purpose flour, cake flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt), but it must be chilled until firm before baking the cookies. The recipe instructs you to use your hands to form the chilled dough into balls that you flatten before baking, but that seemed like a messy way to go about it, so I just used a #24 scoop instead. This was smaller than the recommended size; I ended up with 32 cookies, twice the specified yield.

While the cookies are warm, you spread on a glaze made from powdered sugar, lemon juice, corn syrup, and salt. I found that the glaze crusted over quickly when spread thin, so the easiest way to frost the cookies was to coat them immediately when they came out of the oven. The glaze set shiny and hard.

I tried one of the these cookies while it was fresh from the oven, and it was incredible. The first word that came to mind was "luscious" -- each bite was gushing with lemon flavor, and the moist, warm texture was positively luxurious. At room temperature, these are still very tasty, but just not quite the same. Nonetheless, with their bright, buttery, lemon flavor, these cookies definitely live up to their "lavish" name.

Recipe: "Sam's Glazed Lavish Lemon Cookies," from Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets, by Carole Walter.