Meanwhile, back here in Virginia, the one thing I have made were these cookies. The recipe comes from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook and was recommended to me by my aunt. These cookies are colorful and festive and I made them for my friend to celebrate that she got a new job. I had been wanting to make these, but it’s taken awhile because the recipe is a bit labor intensive and requires some obscure ingredients. For real, I had to order some ingredients online. This cookie is a labor of love. But, sugary sweet, happy, and worth it.

They are a bit like snicker doodles,which the author, Christina Tosi, says is because of the cream of tartar. In the book, Tosi also wrote that she wanted to create boxed Funfetti cake in a cookie. And I think she nailed it. The cookie is so sweet, indulgent, and so cheerful. Yes, I did just say a cookie could be cheerful. I love the colorful sprinkles – it makes them the perfect celebration cookie.

As I said this recipe is from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. This recipe requires a two step process – first you make “crumb” and then you make the cookie dough. Neither step is super challenging, but I thought you should be forewarned. If you get intimidated, just remember how wonderful and pretty sprinkles are and then you’ll be able to keep going.

Ingredients

Crumb:

1/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 tbsp brown sugar

3/8 cup cake flour (45 grams)

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp kosher salt

1 tbsp rainbow sprinkles

1/8 cup grapeseed oil

1/2 tbsp Clear Vanilla Extract (clear or imitation extract is apparently important, makes it taste more like box Funfetti cake)

Cookie Dough:

16 tbsp butter, at room temperature

1 1/2 cups sugar

2 tbsp glucose

2 eggs

2 tsp clear vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups of flour

2/3 cup milk powder

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp baking soda

1 1/4 tsp kosher salt

1/4 rainbow sprinkles

cake crumb recipe

Directions:

1. First we’re making the crumb. Preheat the oven to 300°.

2. Using a stand mixer with a paddle attachment on low speed, mix together the sugars, flour, baking powder, salt, and sprinkles.

3. Add the oil and vanilla. Mix again until evenly mixed and small clusters start to form.

4. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Pour the clusters onto the parchment paper. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Break them up occasionally as they cook. The crumbs should still be a bit moist when you take them out of the oven – they will dry out as they cool.

5. Let them cool completely before using them in the cookie dough. (I waited 1 hour)

6. Take the butter out of the fridge. You can let it come to room temperature while you wait for the crumb to cool.

7. Ok, now start on the cookies. In the stand mixer (which you’ve cleaned out from before), combine the butter, sugar, and glucose. Beat on medium-high for 2 minutes.

8. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat for 7-8 minutes. (Tosi says this is the key to her cookies being great – the butter is so fluffy and creamy this way).

9. Reduce the mixer speed to low. Add the flour, milk powder, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt, and rainbow sprinkles. Mix until the dough just comes together, no more than 1 minute. You do not want to over mix.

10. Add the crumbs and mix in for 30 seconds.

11. Line a cookie sheet with parchment. Portion out the dough into large-ish balls (about 2-3 tbsp). Flatten the tops a bit with your fingers. Cover tightly with plastic wrap.

12. Put the cookies in the fridge for 1 hour, or up to 1 week.

13. When you’re ready to bake, heat the oven to 350°.

14. Arrange the cookies about 3 inches apart on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

15. Bake for 13-18 minutes. They are ready when the edges start to be gold and the center of the cookie is starting to get color. They will seem soft, but they harden as you let them cool.

16. Let cool before serving. Then share them with friends and feel happy!

Messy level: 3 spoons. To make this cookie, you are basically making two recipes and that means a lot of dishes and a lot of chances for flour to fly. Glucose is really sticky and messy, eggs are drippy, and butter is greasy. It’s not the worst mess you’ll ever make but there’s potential. Give yourself time and try to be organized and it won’t be so messy!

The post Confetti Cookies appeared first on Cooking is Messy.

Think of this recipe as something to add to your football snack spread. You’re going to shovel handfuls of this like you might for popcorn or Chex Mix. What’s we will be doing with this recipe is coating and baking-on delicious ingredients on to crushed pretzels. It’s salty, crunch, sweet, and buttery. Really buttery. Uncomfortably butter. So buttery that you shouldn’t think about how much butter is in the recipe. But it’s the holidays, so everything has butter. Why fight it?

Now, this is not as incredibly easy as reindeer noses, but it is a really easy recipe. So, buy a bag of pretzels and use half for reindeer noses and half for this crunch. It’s delicious and people will thank you.

Ingredients:

2 cups mini pretzels

1/4 cup brown sugar, packed

2 tbsp sugar

1/4 milk powder

1 tbsp barley malt powder (this is the unusual ingredient that I had to buy but makes me made I use so little)

7 tbsp melted butter (sometimes I use 6 because the one less tbsp makes me feel better)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 275°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, use your hands to crunch up the pretzels. You want small pieces – not dust – just small pieces. You want it to look like what’s left on the bottom of a bag of pretzels.

3. Add the brown sugar, granulated sugar, milk powder, and malt powder to the pretzels. Stir to coat all the pretzels. You will have some powder left on the bottom of the bowl.

4. Pour in the melted butter. Stir to coat everything. The butter will make a clumpy paste with the powder – that’s what you want even though it’s not that pretty to look at. Stir until everything has been moistened.

5. Pour out your pretzel mix onto the baking sheet. Spread it out in an even layer across the sheet (it likely won’t cover the whole thing).

6. Bake for 20 minutes. It will smell buttery and toasty and be a little golden brown.

7. Let cool, then break up into bite size chunks.

8. Put it in a bowl and pretend you’re going to share with others.

Messy Level: This is two spoons, and the reason being that milk powder is messy! I find it just like flour because it puffs up and gets all over my hands and clothes. Also, at the end when you break the pretzel mix into chunks you’ll end up with a lot of crumbs. It’s not terribly messy, I’m just warning you for clean up time.

The post Pretzel Crunch appeared first on Cooking is Messy.

The blue things on the side of the book are the post-its for all the things I want to make!

A few months ago my aunt suggested that I try out Christina Tosi’s cookbook Milk. It took me awhile to get around to it, but I’m so glad I did, and today’s recipe comes from the book. Let me tell you, I was absolutely enthralled by the book. I found it both intimidating and exciting. I really couldn’t wait to dive in and make a half-dozen recipes.

But let me back up. Momofuku Milk Bar is basically a bakery in New York City. But their cookies, and cakes, and pies, aren’t run of the mill. The use unexpected ingredients to make delightful treats. They use breakfast cereal, salty snacks, and of course sugar, to make amazing baked goods.

At first I was intimidated, and I still am a little bit. Baking is about precision and Tosi takes it pretty seriously. She strongly advocates for measuring ingredients in grams and for using specific ingredients. After the introduction, there is a whole section on ingredients and another section on equipment. This was where I got intimidated because she uses ingredients like glucose, freeze dried corn, and both brown and clear vanilla extract. Tosi recommends buying what you can’t find in stores on Amazon. Whew. For some reason, no matter how amazing a recipe looks, I’m averse to buying an ingredient if I’m not sure I’ll ever use it again. Why can’t I use what I already have?

But what is clear from all these instructions is that Tosi loves Milk Bar and loves what she does. And so most of the time when I get a celebrity or restaurant cookbook it doesn’t feel like these are the real recipes, but instead are instructions altered for public consumption. But, here it feels like these are the true recipes and she’s sharing it with us, her readers, and letting us know that it might be scary but we can make amazing baked goods. And so, why not push myself? If the purpose of my blog and my cooking adventures is to try something new, then I should suck it up and figure out where in the world I can buy malt powder.

What really got me excited about the book is how the recipes are exciting and vivacious. There’s no plain sugar cookie in this book. Every recipe has great personality. Throughout the book there’s a great mix of sweet, salty, crunchy and gooey. I was so inspired by the idea of using rainbow sprinkles, or cornflakes, or crushed pretzel bits. I rented this book from the library, but I’m definitely going to buy a copy on my own because there’s too much I want to try. My only true gripe is there are not enough pictures of the food. I want more drool worthy images!

Look at all the gooey yummy cream cheese!

Anyway, I decided to start out with the bagel bomb recipe. This recipe would push me out of my comfort zone because I hardly ever make bread, but it doesn’t require any hard to find ingredients. To describe this recipe, it’s like a bagel the shape of a dinner roll, baked, and filled with oozy gooey cream cheese. Amazing right? I made them on Saturday for breakfast and Ryan and I had to hold back so we didn’t devour them too fast and burn ourselves on the very hot cream cheese.

What is great about this recipe is that there is so much room for innovation with this recipe. As is, the recipe is for an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese.  But, you could easily knead chocolate chips in the dough and use plain cream cheese. You could also knead in raisins and cinnamon, or dried cranberries. Or you could fill it with salmon cream cheese! Oh the possibilities!

One last note before we get started…  I’m going to give you the ingredient list using cups and spoons, not grams. I know it’s less authentic, I’m sorry! I didn’t use grams because my kitchen scale isn’t sophisticated enough, and I only want to share with you what I actually did. Also, I changed up Tosi’s cream cheese recipe because she used bacon in it and I didn’t feel it was necessary. And finally, “everything bagel topping” calls for black sesame seeds but I didn’t use those. I already had white sesame seeds and I just couldn’t bring myself to buy more sesame seeds. It still tasted good. However, if you make this and decide on using both types of sesame seeds, I’ll be super proud of you.

Ingredients:

Bagels –

3 1/2 cup flour

1 tbsp salt

1/2 packet or 1 1/8 tsp of active dry yeast

1 3/4 cup water at room temperature

grape seed oil (although I used vegetable)

Cream Cheese –

7 ounces cream cheese (buy the kind that’s in a square package, ounce measurements will be on the outside)

3-4 scallion greens thinly sliced (I used the food processor)

1 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

Everything Bagel Topping –

3/4 tsp salt

1 tbsp white sesame seeds

2 tsp black sesame seeds

2 tsp poppy seeds

1 tbsp dried onion

1/2 tsp onion powder

1/4 tsp garlic powder.

Other

1 egg

1/2 tsp water

Directions:

1. Start with the cream cheese because it takes the longest. Chop up the scallions into small pieces. Put the cream cheese in a bowl and beat until lighter and smooth. You can beat it a.) by hand (ouch! my arm would be tired) b.) electric hand mixer c.) Tosi’s recommendation, stand mixer with paddle attachment on medium.

In case you don’t know what yeast looks like… at the store it comes in packets and you can find it in the baking aisle

2. Add the scallions, sugar, and salt to the cream cheese and beat until well mixed.

3. On a parchment lined baking sheet, put 8 lumps of cream cheese. Freeze until hard, about 1-3 hours. I left mine in 1.5 hours.

4. Now move on to the dough; that takes the next longest. Tosi recommends a stand mixer, and that’s the directions I’ll use, but I’ve made bread dough before completely by hand, so if you don’t have a stand mixer, I am confident you can still do this recipe. ANYWAY. Put the flour, salt, and yeast in a bowl. Hold the dough hook in your hand and mix. Basically pretend the dough hook is a spoon.

5. Slowly add the water. Continue mixing, by hand, using the dough hook. Tosi says it should be a “shaggy mass,” which to me meant the dough was a little shredded looking and not smooth.

6. Attach the dough hook to the machine. Mix on the lowest speed for 7 minutes. At about 3.5 minutes in you can stop and check the progress if you feel so inclined. Tosi says it should “look like a wet ball.” Mine didn’t look wet, but it was sticky and when I poked it the dough slowly bounced back into place (which she said it should). If yours looks really wet, then add a little flour.

7. Grease a large bowl with oil. To do this, I poured a little oil in a bowl then used a paper towel to coat all the sides. Put your dough in the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap. Let it sit for 45 minutes.

8. Mix all the ingredients for the everything bagel topping in a small bowl. Set aside.

9. Heat oven to 350°.

10. Lightly flour your work surface. Put the dough on your surface. Punch down the dough to flatten it. Using a dough cutter (or a ruler, or something that shape) divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. Using your hands and gently stretch the dough pieces to be about 3 inches wide.

11. Put a frozen cream cheese lump into the center of each piece of dough.

12. Bring the edges of the dough up and around the cream cheese. Pinch the dough shut, then roll the ball gently in your hand to seal it up.

13. Put the bagel balls on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Give 3-4 inches of space between bagels.

14. Whisk the egg and 1/2 tsp of water. Brush each bagel with a generous coating of the egg mixture.

15. Generously sprinkle the everything bagel topping over the bagel. Cover it as much as you can!

16. Bake for about 25 minutes. You want it to be a light golden brown and the cream cheese should be exploding and oozing out of some the bagels. Looks great right? I want to run home and make this right now. Thank you Milk Bar!

Messy Level:  This recipe is more time consuming than it is messy. I’ll call it a 2 spoon recipe. You need to use a few bowls, but nothing flies all around or gets sticky or crazy. Yes, the cream cheese oozes, but then you just dip in the bagel. This recipe cleans itself. YUM.

The post Bagel Bombs appeared first on Cooking is Messy.