Cookie

These light, melt-in-your-mouth cookies are named for my good friend Kim, who started baking them as a child with her Scandinavian grandmother. While Kim makes them with her kids during the Christmas holidays, I think they are great for a spring or summer party. I tint the butter icing a light pink or pale blue. They always disappear quickly: kids love them, adults can’t resist them, and I never tire of them.

Why wouldn’t you bake cookies for yourself? Cookie dough freezes beautifully, and if you cut it into portions before freezing, you can have a plastic bag filled with the potential for cookies any time you feel like it. These salty-sweet cookies use one of my go-to ingredients: homemade nut butter. I use a Vita-Mix to churn just about any freshly roasted nut into butter, but you can accomplish the same trick with a food processor and a little oil. A food processor nut butter won’t be as super-smooth as one made in a Vita-Mix, but in a cookie like this, a little sandy texture from the bits of ground pistachio is a good thing.

I know I’m not alone when I say that snickerdoodles were my favorite cookie as a kid. Hell, they’re pretty much my favorite cookie as an adult. My mother’s 1970s recipe used shortening, but I prefer to make them with all butter, to deepen their flavor with brown sugar, and to scent them heavily with ethereal cardamom. This recipe calls for them to cool on a wire rack, but do yourself a favor and eat at least a few while they’re still warm, and be prepared to go weak-kneed. Snickerdoodles will keep at room temperature, in an airtight container, for about 3 days.

In the physical universe, there is precious little closer to perfection than an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. Unlike standard cookies, they are never cakey or disappointingly hard, not too sweet, with the butter and oats finding common cause in each other’s virtues. So how do you improve upon perfection? Topping these cookies with a beautiful flaky salt brings out the cow in the butter, the hills in the oats, and the jungle in the chocolate. Topping them with the salt rather than just adding it to the batter sets the salt free to work its mojo with each of the ingredients as they combine in your mouth. For these cookies, I prefer Bali Rama Pyramid sea salt, which has really cool hollow pyramidal crystals and a great, snappy impact. The advantage of using a flake salt here is that it remains delicate even after baking. The Bali Rama Pyramid salt does a spectacular job of bringing just enough drama to the cookies to make them sparkle while keeping everything mellow enough to assure they remain a comfort food. Other good choices are Cyprus flake or Halen Môn, or, in a pinch, any good fleur de sel.

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 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.

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 heat of a New York summer for my lunch or afternoon snack.

After the milk crumb phenomenon in the kitchen, we had to find a mainstream use for it, rather than just hiding it under some ice cream. It needed its moment in the sun. So I brainstormed. A peaches-and-cream cookie was my original thought. Momofuku does mean “lucky peach” in Japanese, after all. But I decided we needed something that would hit home even more for guests. Did you know dried blueberries existed? I didn’t, until I surveyed Whole Foods’ dried fruit selection for a dried peach alternative. The clouds parted, and it was clear. We needed a blueberry-and-cream cookie, reminiscent of a blueberry muffin top (the best part of the muffin).

We’re awfully fond of celebrating the holidays with annoying decorative knickknacks. Or, rather, my mother loves to buy annoying decorative knickknacks and send them to us, and we love to make it look like a holiday just threw up in our kitchen. We like our cookies to celebrate the holidays too—that’s how we came up with our winter “holiday” cookie, a cornflake-marshmallow cookie with crushed candy canes in it.

I am neither brave nor bold enough to make just a chocolate chip cookie. Everyone’s mom or grandma makes “the best” chocolate chip cookie. And every one of those chocolate chip cookie recipes is different. So, out of respect, we dared not compete. Instead, we made a delicious chocolate chip tribute cookie—one of our most popular cookies—by accident. In the Ko basement one day, Mar overtoasted the cornflake crunch for the cereal milk panna cotta. She was pissed. I was pissed. But we refused to let it go to waste. I was already well versed in making a cookie out of anything left in the pantry, and we needed a dessert for family meal anyway. So we made cookies with the cornflake crunch, and we threw in some mini chocolate chips, just to make them appealing to the cooks in case the overtoasted cornflakes were a bust, and some mini marshmallows, because we were eating them as a snack, and why the hell not. It was just family meal. The cooks freaked. They requested the cookies for family meal every day after that. And so the cornflake-chocolate-chip-marshmallow cookie was born—love at first bite and a shoo-in on Milk Bar’s opening menu.

For years, this was a recipe I didn’t let out of my kitchen—I don’t know why, but everybody has one or two recipes like that. I finally relented and gave a copy to Rick Bishop, Milk Bar’s favorite strawberry farmer, and he told me he hid it under his kitchen sink, where he knew it would be safe.

You won’t believe how good this easy cookie is. For a change, press a Hershey’s Kiss down into the center of each ball of dough. Omit the crisscross design.