Baking

Have you ever had a turkey croissandwich on an airplane, or in a country club, or at a catered corporate event? The ones made with mass-produced croissants and stuffed with turkey cut in half? We always want to like them, but they’re always so disappointing. So we came up with one we love. The mustard croissant is very similar to the kimchi croissant in technique, but it is stuffed with meat, cheese, and condiments instead of blue cheese. You can substitute your favorite meat-and-cheese sandwich combo, if you prefer, for the turkey and Swiss.

Black pepper brioche makes killer club sandwich bread or savory bread pudding. It also makes a mean sandwich with Thanksgiving or Christmas leftovers. There are plenty of elaborate ways to form a loaf of bread, and even more intricate ways to form a loaf of brioche, but it all tastes the same, and you’ve already cheated death by using the mother dough, so we’re going to take it easy on the loaf-forming lecture. Take the ice cream scoop you use for cookies and use it to scoop rounds of the dough into a loaf pan.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to make a good banana cake. I’m talking about a sheet cake that tastes like banana bread, but not too dry, not too tough, and not dense and fudgy, like the dead center of banana bread can be at times. For weeks, maybe even a month, we worked on a banana cake in the basement of Ko. It felt like a lifetime—and still we weren’t getting anywhere close. That is, until Emily, our extern, came in with her mother’s sacred banana cake recipe. We adapted it, but this recipe belongs to the heart of her family. Mrs. Kritemeyer, we love you!

Like the candy bar pie, this banana cake is a doozy to make, but it’s here because it’s a bestseller at Milk Bar—so much so, that in two years, it is the only cake that has never been rotated out, based on season or popularity. It is Oprah’s favorite cake, and it will be yours too.

This recipe makes two pies (two pies are always better than one), but you can always keep the second pie frozen if need be!

In the fall of 2008, Ssäm Bar needed a seasonal dessert, and Concord grapes were on the brain. Best man I know suggested I do a take on a pb & j, but my way, using techniques and perhaps a flavor that made sense but was unexpected. I chose the path of a panna cotta, made with milk steeped with the flavor of a saltine cracker: salty and soda-y—a poor man’s pb & j. People were going to love it or hate it. And that was perfectly fine with me, because I loved it, though the saltine milk is not for wussies.

One of the earliest descriptions we got from our crack pie addicts was, “It’s like a pecan pie, without the pecans”—which I secretly hated. It’s so much more, and so much less. But one day we finally read between the lines and sarcastically, we thought, made a crack pie with pecans in the pie. It blew my mind a little. There aren’t too many boundaries in terms of the variations. So get crazy.

This cookie dough is much softer than that of all the other cookie recipes in this book. Fear not: although there is a different ratio of butter to peanut butter to glucose, because peanut butter behaves differently than regular butter in baking recipes, this will yield the same crunchy-on-the-outside, fudgy-in-the-center Milk Bar cookie, I promise. 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.

When we first opened Milk Bar, at 4 or 5 o’clock every morning we would make fresh cinnamon buns with liquid cheesecake rolled up into the dough instead of applying cream cheese frosting on top. Cinnamon buns are something I feel very strongly about, since my mother started a tradition of making (not-so-great) ones for breakfast on every holiday. (Sorry, Mom, but you can’t give a kid a Cinnabon and then expect her to be OK with cinnamon buns made with margarine and skim milk!) We’d make them before the crack of dawn so they’d be ready for breakfast . . . and then we’d sell most of them to people on their way home at night, ready to tuck in with dessert and some TV. So we decided to get smart and create something that was delicious, available, and fresh at any hour, and didn’t have to be made to order every morning: the cinnamon bun pie.

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

My mama is a busy, busy woman. If she were baking this cake, she would probably opt to buy preshredded carrots from the grocery store. She likes baking shortcuts and, in this case, it’s quite possible she doesn’t know where her box grater is (or if the handle is still attached to it). I’m not going to lie. I’ve bought preshredded carrots, and the results weren’t one bit terrible. But at the farmers’ market, they’ve got yellow carrots and purple carrots and orange carrots that actually taste like something. And they will make your cake better if you use them.

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.

When we were in the Spanish Harlem rental kitchen for the summer of 2010, our cornflake-chocolate-chip-marshmallow cookie just wouldn’t bake up right in the busted convection ovens we were forced to use. So we stopped our crying, stopped making the cookie for a while, and took the opportunity to bring a new cookie into creation. The confetti cookie combines the technique of a snickerdoodle (cream of tartar makes all the difference in telling an average cookie apart from a snickerdoodle-inspired one) with the flavors of funfetti cake mix.