It’s been more than 12 years since Christina Tosi opened her first Milk Bar bakery in New York’s East Village, so named for its soft serve ice cream made with milk from the bottom of a cereal bowl.
The former pastry chef for David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants has won fame for other nostalgia-inspired items such as birthday cakes flecked with rainbow sprinkles, a gooey chess-like pie with an oatmeal cookie crust, and Compost Cookies containing remnants of graham crackers, potato chips, pretzels and butterscotch chips.
Since then, Tosi has starred in several Netflix series, authored seven books, opened storefronts in other cities and channeled her sweet-treat wizardry into a line of products shipped nationwide.
“Cookies are where it all started for me,” she writes in the opening “pep talk” of her latest book, “All About Cookies” (Potter, $35). As an awkward teenager in Ohio and Virginia, she found that “I was happiest when my head was down, lost in my own imagination, a wooden spoon and a beat-up bowl ready for magic to be made.” Wandering the snack and cereal aisles of supermarkets triggered her creativity then as it does today.
She credits her grandmothers ( “real waste-not-want-not types”) with leading her to the realization that “anything that I can grind into a flour-like state” could sub for all or part of the all-purpose flour in her creations. That’s how blitzed Rice Krispies came to join peanut butter in PB Sandies, and mini pretzels became the flour for chocolate chunk cookies.
In these pages, Tosi keeps the techniques simple and focuses instead on inventive flavor and texture combos, categorized in chapters such as Sandies & Sammies, Dense & Fudgies, Low Bakes & No Bakes and Crunchies & Crispies. She shows you how to build a cookie cake, whip up a 3-Ingredient Cookie Pie, and add a “corny moment” to a savory cheese wafer with a spoonful of grits. That dough is chilling in my fridge ready for baking; the plateful of nutty, fudgy Little Motivators infused with espresso sitting on my counter is disappearing fast.
“Bake a few batches with me,” she vows, and “you’ll never look at cookies the same way again.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
Sign up for the AJC Food and Dining Newsletter
Read more stories like this by liking Atlanta Restaurant Scene on Facebook, following @ATLDiningNews on Twitter and @ajcdining on Instagram.
About the Author
The Latest
Featured
