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.

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