AARP Hearing Center
Henry Hargreaves
Cookies are always in season, but they particularly shine in December when they make appearances at holiday fetes. Those seeking inspiration for the holidays and beyond can find it in Christina Tosi’s latest cookbook, All About Cookies: A Milk Bar Baking Book (November 2022).
Random House
Bake With Christina
Tosi shared three recipes from All About Cookies for AARP members to try:
It’s no surprise that this dense, sweet, gooey monster is a deep part of Milk Bar’s flavor and textural heritage.
The sprinkles are the star of the show in these confetti cookies gone crispy.
Chocolate Peppermint Pretzel Snaps
Snaps are a Milk Bar invention — cookie on the bottom with a spreadable layer on top, paired with something salty or crunchy then dunked in something to merge the flavors. And these are the very first snap in Milk Bar history.
Tosi, a chef, best-selling author and founder of Milk Bar, brings us into a cookie wonderland, sharing recipes from and inspired by Milk Bar’s fan favorites. The chain of dessert and bakery restaurants began in 2008 inside Chef David Chang’s restaurant, Momofuku. Today, Milk Bar has branches in multiple cities including New York City, L.A., Boston, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C.
All About Cookies contains some of the celebrated pastry chef and 41-year-old entrepreneur’s most coveted recipes, such as the crunchy corn cookies (a cornbread-like cookie “cranked up to an 11” by sugar and butter, Tosi writes in the book) and compost animal crackers. There are also gooey cookies, crispy cookies, bar cookies and even cookie cakes that bakers of all levels can make.
In true Tosi fashion, her cookies go beyond the ordinary, though she uses simple, accessible ingredients to create whimsical treats that delight. “Sometimes, even the most basic ingredients have an opportunity to contribute to the flavor story, or in this case, drive it,” Tosi writes of her jelly doughnut cookie recipe. This recipe relies on leftover fryer oil to imbue these cookies with a classic doughnut taste (no worries, if you don’t have leftover fryer oil, she has substitutions).
Similarly, the pumpkin dulce bars make use of ingredients often found in the pantry (surely you have a couple of cans of pumpkin left over from the fall tucked away). “I fell in love with the combo of pumpkin and dulce de leche when we dreamed it up as the star layers of a cinnamon-butterscotch sponge cake at Milk Bar,” Tosi writes in the book. Now, this combo is the star of its own bar cookie that’s probably best enjoyed with a cup of coffee.
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Cookies captured Tosi’s heart as a child. She shares in All About Cookies that she dreamed of opening a bakery dedicated to cookies. “Cookies were the secret to living my life on my terms,” she writes. “Decades later, not a single thing has changed.”
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