Chocolate

During many a week, candy bars make up 50 percent (or more) of my diet. As a teen, I already showed a predilection for staying hip to the culinary scene at the grocery store, trolling the aisles to check out interesting frozen items, new cereals, perhaps a vamped-up cookie section, and, of course, the impulse-buy area—one of my favorites—with its multitude of candy bars trying to break into the market. Which is why I was hooked on Take 5 candy bars long before I ever thought about making a pie inspired by them. I was blown away by my first bite of one, in the passenger seat of the family van in the Giant parking lot of NoVa. My sister had one cluster, and the other was all mine. It is the epitome of perfectly layered chocolate, peanuts, caramel, peanut butter, and pretzels. Hershey’s describes it as “a unique taste experience combining five favorite ingredients in one candy bar. The result is a delicious salty sweet snack unlike anything else.” Amazing. For my birthday a couple of years ago, Dave bought me two cases, that’s 480 clusters, of Take 5 candy bars and dared me to eat them all in a month. With a little help from my friends, I did it in twenty-eight days. On my birthday, that first day, I ate seven—and then puked the next morning (bad idea). Marian Mar made a big push to get this pie on the opening menu of Milk Bar, because, as she once put it, we are candy bars, and candy bars are us. So we need a candy bar pie on the menu. It’s a little bit of a bitch to make, which was my main argument for wanting to leave it off the menu. But working in this industry is a labor of love, after all, and Marian was right all along. This pie is one of our top sellers even today. We lovingly refer to it at Milk Bar as the T-5 pie.

This is our high-brow fudge sauce for the Earl Grey lovers out there (Mama Meehan, we’re looking at you).

I wasn’t raised on malt as a flavor, but as we expanded our little kitchen staff, Leslie Behrens opened us up to a world of malt. After many attempts at this sauce, we found the secret to a deep, dark underlying malt flavor is a splash of molasses—not enough to taste molasses, but enough to give a deep, dark depth beyond chocolate alone.

Make this glaze just before using it—it needs to be warm so that you can properly make a mess of the top of a pie with it.

We tried, tried, tried to make this work with our liquid cheesecake—one of our mother recipes and one of my favorite things to eat and cook with—but the finished pie just wasn’t right. So we came up with this work-around. This filling is very deep in flavor and sweetness, only meant to be layered in a gooey brownie pie. Do not attempt to snack on it or use it in another recipe.

Our grasshopper pie is like a brownie pie that got drunk on crème de menthe.

Our most successful new offering in 2010 was our cake truffles, spawned entirely from leftovers. We had once served slices of cake to order, but after hemming and hawing with our endearing staff of counter employees over the correct way to slice and serve a multilayered cake, we decided to get smart. Helen and Leslie were the catalyst behind convincing me to make cake truffles with all of our leftover cake and cake layering scraps. Now, instead of committing to a whole slice of cake, you can get a bite or two or three. You can choose to follow the recipe, or get crazy, without our guidance, using leftovers to concoct your own. Don’t limit yourself to carrot cake; you can use any cake scrap and any leftover fillings, crumbs, or crunches. Chocolate Chip Cake (page 94) scraps with Fudge Sauce (page 136) and ground Peanut Brittle (page 169) couldn’t be anything but a success.

When I was a baker at a conference center on Star Island, twelve miles off the coast of New Hampshire, I learned to make this kind of cookie from one of the best bakers I know, Mandy Lamb. She would put different ingredients in the cookie each day or each week and have people try and guess what the random secret ingredients were. Because we were on an island in New England, when storms blew in, we were trapped. No one traveled to the island, and, more important, no boats with food on them came our way, either. We had to get creative and use what we had on hand. We might not have had enough chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies, but if we threw in other mix-ins as well, the seven hundred some guests would never notice the shortage of one ingredient—and the cookies would always feel brand new, because they were different every time. I found after many batches that my favorite compost cookies had my favorite snacks in them: chocolate and butterscotch chips, potato chips, pretzels, graham crackers, and coffee (grounds). Compost cookies always turn out great in my mother’s kitchen because she infamously has a hodgepodge of mix-ins, none in great enough quantity to make an actual single-flavored cookie on its own. My brother-in-law calls them “garbage cookies”; others call them “kitchen sink cookies.” Call them what you want, and make them as we make them at Milk Bar, or add your own favorite snacks to the cookie base in place of ours.

Happy birthday, Dave Chang! That’s what the kitchen screamed when we first made this cake. Marian was in charge of making boss man a birthday cake. She told me she channeled her innermost version of me, sprinkled chocolate chips into a vanilla cake batter we were going to use as a coconut cake, and layered it with liquid cheesecake and anything else she could find in the fridge; in other words, she followed to a tee our standard operating procedure for any birthday cake in our kitchen. Now even the Momofuku savory cooks know this cake by heart. It is a snack attack waiting to happen, so you may want to consider making a double batch of batter and baking the cake in a half sheet pan.

Passion fruit, chocolate, and coffee is one of my favorite flavor trios. Though the combo sounds a little out there, it’s actually beloved in lots of pastry kitchens. I wanted a way to feature it in a mainstream dessert. Turns out a deep vanilla chocolate chip layer cake is the perfect fit.

An ode to my favorite baked good of all time, the fudgy brownie, this cookie has a healthy salt content and, to me, is perfection. I freeze a few of these in the dense heat of a New York summer for my lunch or afternoon snack.

I am neither brave nor bold enough to make just a chocolate chip cookie. Everyone’s mom or grandma makes “the best” chocolate chip cookie. And every one of those chocolate chip cookie recipes is different. So, out of respect, we dared not compete. Instead, we made a delicious chocolate chip tribute cookie—one of our most popular cookies—by accident. In the Ko basement one day, Mar overtoasted the cornflake crunch for the cereal milk panna cotta. She was pissed. I was pissed. But we refused to let it go to waste. I was already well versed in making a cookie out of anything left in the pantry, and we needed a dessert for family meal anyway. So we made cookies with the cornflake crunch, and we threw in some mini chocolate chips, just to make them appealing to the cooks in case the overtoasted cornflakes were a bust, and some mini marshmallows, because we were eating them as a snack, and why the hell not. It was just family meal. The cooks freaked. They requested the cookies for family meal every day after that. And so the cornflake-chocolate-chip-marshmallow cookie was born—love at first bite and a shoo-in on Milk Bar’s opening menu.