kittymcnasty asked: Thank you so much for the follow! I think what you are doing is completely awesome, I'm a huge Momofuku/David Chang fan.

Thanks for following me as well! It’s kind of a crazy undertaking, but it’s been delicious and way too much fun so far. Hope you had a wonderful New Year’s celebration…

Happy New Year!

What’s next?

Birthday Layer Cake

A from-scratch spin on your best childhood memories of box-ready Funfetti cake.

This is the cake that inspired my Momofuku Milk Bar love affair. I picked up a package of Birthday Cake Truffles (basically cake balls, but 1,000,000 times tastier than that implies!) and was completely hooked. When I brought a full Birthday Cake back with me after a work trip to NYC, it didn’t take much for The Husband* and I to decide we’d suddenly stumbled upon our wedding cake! 

Milk Bar Birthday Cake tastes like the best memories of being six years old - indulgently sweet, but somehow not overwhelmingly so. It’s delicious and indulgent and delightfully silly. All those sprinkles! The whimsy of this as a multi-tiered wedding cake just seemed perfect. [It didn’t even occur to us until we were in Manhattan with both our mothers for the official tasting that the wizarding crew at Milk Bar could do different cake flavors for each layer. Birthday Cake still made the cut - but it was joined by a few friends.]

Before the Milk Bar Cookbook was published in October, I spent the year playing with and adapting every cake recipe I could find. Thomas Keller’s white cupcake recipe, Baking Illustrated’s white cake… Adding sprinkles wantonly to everything and trying to get the buttercream frosting just right. It was always good - but I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.

It turns out, Christina Tosi has a secret:

“We use brown (standard) vanilla extract in 90 percent of our baked goods. It’s the extract that flavors nearly every homemade chocolate chip cookie. We use imitation vanilla extract for the Birthday Cake, Birthday Cake Crumb, and Birthday Cake Frosting. It is vanilla in flavor, but not flavored by any actual vanilla beans. It’s “vanilla” more of a guilty tub-of-frosting, cake-box way. The two are not interchangeable…”

The answer was brilliant in its simplicity. No wonder this cake tastes more of memories than anything else. Imitation vanilla makes all the difference!

Assembly order, from base to top:

• Birthday Cake
• Birthday Cake Soak
• Birthday Cake Frosting
• Birthday Crumbs
• More frosting
• Birthday Cake
• Birthday Cake soak, again
• More Birthday Cake Frosting
• Birthday Crumbs
• Even more Frosting
• Birthday Cake
• The rest of the frosting
• A few last crumbs for decoration

Observation 1: Compared to the rest of the layer cake recipes, this one is surprisingly simple. One kind of cake, brushed with simple soak of milk and vanilla. Tons of frosting. And Birthday Cake Crumbs for texture, crunch, and garnish. [Some assembly required.]

Issue 1: Sprinkles are delicious - but they don’t do well with moisture. I learned this the hard way with a different cake attempt over the summer. Even an extra fifteen seconds in the mixer and enough color comes off the sprinkles that your entire cake batter comes out slightly blue. Intriguing, but not really what we’re going for. To avoid this, drop the sprinkles in at the last possible moment, mix for just a few seconds at most, and get your batter into the pan and into the oven. Don’t forget one last dense layer of sprinkles over the top of the batter once it’s in the pan!

Issue 2: As I discussed with the Chocolate Chip Cake, it’s still quite a challenge to add whatever ingredient follows a layer of crumbs. The dollop-and-squish method seems to work best, but it does mean you’re going to push filling out in between the layers.

Issue 3: The cookbook suggests you use a 6” cake ring, extended by a ring of acetate so that all the layers stay put (despite constant prodding). After freezing the cake until it sets, the cake ring and acetate are easily removed. While I have the cake ring, I haven’t invested in acetate yet. Until then, I’m making do with plastic wrap during the freezing process (see photo, from cakestravaganza). It works well enough.

Variation From Recipe: None. Replicated with fidelity.

Verdict: Love it! For an impressive-as-hell, sure-fire-hit cake that doesn’t take an entire afternoon, trust the magic of sprinkles. And our collective taste memories of childhood.

* At that point he was The Fiancé

Chocolate Chip Layer Cake

Chocolate chip cake, passion fruit curd, chocolate crumbs, coffee buttercream frosting, and chocolate chips.

This is the cake you’ve been waiting for. Even if you didn’t know it.

Of the items in the Milk Bar cookbook* that The Husband and I have previously tasted, this is probably our favorite. In fact, Chocolate Chip Cake took the place of honor as the largest tier of our wedding cake.

Buy yourself some Passion Fruit Puree, clear an afternoon for baking up a storm, and I’m sure you’ll be hooked too.

Assembly order, from base to top:

• Chocolate Chip Cake
• Passion Fruit Soak
• Passion Fruit Curd
• Chocolate Crumbs
• Coffee Buttercream Frosting
• Chocolate Chip Cake
• Passion Fruit Soak
• Passion Fruit Curd
• Chocolate Crumbs
• Coffee Frosting
• Chocolate Chip Cake
• Coffee Frosting
• Chocolate Chips

Observation 1: The cake base is essentially a simple yellow cake - but, right before you bake it, you sprinkle the entire top of the cake with mini chocolate chips. These have the unexpected effect of making the tiny bits of cake that remain exposed even crustier/crispier than usual. And since the chips all stay exposed, they re-harden once cooled rather than staying gooey like in chocolate chip cookies. Again, Tosi playing with texture to great effect.

Observation 2: The recipe for Passion Fruit Curd makes more than you need for the cake itself. Save the extra. This cake is delicious - and is even better served with some extra Passion Fruit Curd.

Issue 1: Nearly all of the Milk Bar cakes involve a gooey filling and a dry Crumb of some kind for crunch. This makes assembly a bit challenging, as you nee to do a layer of goo (in this case Passion Fruit Curd) then the crumbs (Chocolate) then more goo (sometimes this is the same as the first layer, but in this case it’s the Coffee Buttercream Frosting.) Spreading an even layer of anything on top of dry crumbs-in-goo is challenging at best. Crumbs get dragged around the first layer of curd and stick to the spoon and you almost inevitably use more of the top layer than intended. A circle of dollops squished into place with the next layer of cake seems to work best.

Issue 2: After using two much Coffee Frosting to top of the bottom two layers didn’t leave nearly enough for the top of the cake. I ended up making a second half-batch of frosting to finish it off, before covering the whole things with another dense layer of mini chocolate chips.

Issue 3: Probably best to make two cakes. Sharing is hard.

Variation From Recipe: Needed one and a half recipes of of the Coffee Buttercream Frosting. Highly recommended to make extra - even a double batch. Plus, it’s tasty!

Verdict: Love it! More than lived up to expectations. Now I’m almost resentful of the rest of the book since I have to keep making other creations rather than simply living off Chocolate Chip Layer Cake forever!

* Three of the best Momofuku desserts I’ve ever tasted were not included in the book: Strawberry Lemon Layer Cake, Pretzel Cake (made with beer ganache and burnt honey frosting!), and the craziest (and most delicious) strawberry and green pea creation from Ma Pêche. [I suppose the last one is understandable, as it wasn’t really a Milk Bar recipe, per se, but its omission is devastating nonetheless.] One can only hope the two cake recipes will eventually find their way online.**

** Or that Tosi is into bribery.

Passion Fruit Puree is hard to find. No one carries it. Ordering it online is expensive, largely because it comes in quantities larger than you (currently) think you need.

Buy it. Do it now.

Trust me.

Apple Pie Layer Cake, Version 2.0

Barely Brown Butter Cake, Liquid Cheese Cake, Pie Crumbs, Apple Pie Compote, and Pie Crust Butter Cream Frosting

This was my second at-bat with Apple Pie Layer Cake, but it certainly won’t be the last. I anticipate this recipe going into heavy (though probably seasonal) rotation. It was good at Thanksgiving, but even better here.

Observation 1: The only real difference - other than a bit of practice with the various recipes involved (not to mention layer cake architecture) - was two pieces of equipment. I had my 6” cake round which, not surprisingly, proved more effective at cutting and assembling the various layers than the lid from a plastic juice pitcher.

Observation 2: Even more noticeable, using a quarter sheet pan rather than a half sheet pan ensured that I was dealing with three 6” layers of cake of the correct thickness - rather than six layers that were each half as high. This kept the overall cake consistency both lighter and spongier - and didn’t have the extra “crust” like last time.

Variation From Recipe: None. Replicated with fidelity.

Verdict: (Still) Love it!

For our annual Holiday & Feelings Party at work - not to mention The Husband’s birthday the following day - I decided that I’d go ahead and volunteer to make dessert. Seemed lik a great opportunity to get all fancy in the kitchen for people I care about.

So, I put on some crap TV (or maybe not-so-crap TV… I can’t even remember!) and spend an entire weekend baking five Milk Bar cakes. Two Birthday Layer Cakes. Two Chocolate Chip Layer Cakes. And one Apple Pie Layer Cake, since it had been such a success at Thanksgiving. 

I originally hoped to make the Chocolate Malt Layer Cake as well, but I couldn’t find any Malt-flavor Ovaltine in the city. That one would just have to wait until after Christmas.

Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies

Chocolate cookies with… no chocolate chips?!

Remember when I said that Chèvre Frozen Yogurt was my first “unmitigated disaster”? Wrong! In hindsight, one single component of a super-complicated dish was less-than-perfect the first time I made it. [For the record, the second attempt - without Killer Goat Cheese Jell-O Fridge Time - worked just fine.]

But to have something as simple as Chocolate-Chocolate Cookies turnout inedible? I never saw that one coming.

I want to preface this with two things:

Thing The First: I am not a chocolate lover. It’s fine. It doesn’t turn me on. Crazy chocolatey insanity is just not my thing.

Thing The Second: “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 hear of a New York summer for my lunch or afternoon snack.” - Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi, on the Chocolate-Chocolate Cookie.

Technically, I am still not sure if I just messed up phenomenally - or if this recipe is just terrible.* I’m 90% sure of the latter, but it’s scary to bash a Milk Bar recipe on The Interwebz for the first time. I’m definitely going to give it another shot before I pass judgement.

As noted before, I like cookies moist and soft. And these cookies were dry - not crispy, dry. Like scone dry or biscuit dry. I briefly thought it was intentional - the idea of a cookie “ode to the fudgy brownie” - perhaps intended to be more cake and less cookie dough than I, personally, prefer. But I make brownies all the time - and they are moist and soft and (to steal Tosi’s word) fudgy. These were just dry.

The best brownies I’ve ever eaten were Thomas Keller’s recipe in Ad Hoc At Home. They rock for three reasons:

1. lots of cocoa powder
2. tons of butter
3. 1.5 cups of chopped up chocolate added right at the end, leaving melted chocolate goo mixed throughout the finished brownies 

Thomas Keller’s brownies have two obvious chocolate sources (the batter and the melted chips) and the latter improves upon the first. These cookies have two chocolate sources as well (the batter and Chocolate Crumbs) but the latter almost completely undermines the first. Chocolate chips add gooeyness. Chocolate Crumbs - essentially pre-baked dried chocolate batter crumbles - add texture, but dries out the cookies in the process.

In some situations, this texture contrast can be brilliant (See: Apple Pie Layer Cake). In other situations, baked goods don’t need to be drier and sandier and crunchier. For me, a double chocolate cookie - especially one aiming to be a fudgy cookie-riff on brownies - needs to be irresistibly moist and buttery and overwhelmingly chocolatey. They don’t need an extra component that (sadly) makes them seem dry (or even stale) fresh out of the oven. 

Issue 1: This was in our pre-silpat baking days. The first cookie sheet got a bit burned on the bottom. Those were discarded and not relevant to the discussion above. The second and third cookie sheets didn’t burn.

Issue 2: I completely forgot to take a picture. Version 2.0 will include photography, I promise.

Variation From Recipe: None. Replicated with fidelity.

Verdict: Further testing required. Outlook not so good.

* I have a vague memory of trying this cookie at Milk Bar sometime in 2010 or early 2011. A group of friends was sampling every available type of cookie, and this was the universal pick for least favorite. I don’t recall that it tasted bad - unlike my version - just that all the other Milk Bar cookies are so phenomenally good that this paled in comparison. I also don’t remember the cookie being particularly dry. Another reason that I owe this recipe another shot before I declare it an official “miss.”