All About Cookies: A Milk Bar Baking Book

Pep Talk


In the wild, wonderful world of dessert, possibilities are endless when you turn on the oven: crimped pie crusts when the season gives you bushels of fruit, layers of cake (unfrosted on the sides, obvi) when there's a celebration nigh. But what about all the days in between? Cookies are what I always choose.

Cookies are where it all started for me. Cookies were my first invitation into the kitchen. Cookies were the thing that inspired my first apron, my first step stool, my first mess, and, of course, my first, and perhaps greatest, food obsession.

When I was a kid, I passed on dreams of being the first female president or a prized veterinarian to dream about opening Cookies, Cookies, Cookies, my not-so-cleverly-named bakery. Cookies made my grandmothers my heroes, my best friends. Cookies were my safe place in the world in my awkward teenage years.

Cookies were the secret to living life on my terms. Decades later, not a single thing has changed.

Once I learned to follow a recipe, I made batch after batch, and then batch after batch after ditching the recipe. I experimented, asking myself, "What if I added twice the sugar? Half the flour? Double the baking soda?" As you might imagine, there were some good batches, but mostly a lot of really, really bad batches. My poor mother, Greta, would remark every time, "Ooooh. Yum!" She nibbled through each disaster after a long day's work with a big, proud smile.

I kept at it. I was happiest when my head was down, when I was lost in my own imagination, a wooden spoon and a beat-up bowl ready for magic to be made.

I took the leap to move to New York City, hone my skills, and sharpen my craft-and find direction in my life. I worked with nearly every pastry form and occupation my new home had to offer: breads, crème pâtissière, chibousts, croissants, macarons, and mignardises, plated desserts aplenty, sorbets, sundaes, soufflés, and more. I traversed every possible dessert only to find the thing I was looking for was the very thing I already knew: The answer was cookies.

It's been over twelve years since I opened Milk Bar, going from home baking twelve cookies to a batch, to industrial sheet pans yielding forty-eight cookies per bake, to now a cookie factory line that runs tens of thousands of cookies at a time. And I'm STILL just getting started.

But along the way it's always been important to refill the creativity well. Milk Bar has a roster of triedand-trues that we've made for years: the cornflakechocolate chip-marshmallow cookie, the compost, the confetti, the corn, the chocolate-chocolate, the blueberry and cream. If you've baked from my other books, you know my cookie past . . . you may know some of the classics from my childhood, like my mom's famous The Gretas, or my Grandma's Oatmeal Cookies. But the recipes that lie ahead of you are from my cookie present.

I've gone deep into our bag of tricks, brushed up on baking science, even reinvented a few of the Milk Bar classics or some of our favorite flavor stories. And what's come out is a collection of brand-new cookie recipes, ideas, and even cookie forms that I have never been more excited about.

For those of you who think a cookie is just a cookie, and all cookie cookbooks are the same, welcome, my friend, to our crazy, amazing love affair with the most unsung hero of pastry. Bake a few batches with me and, I promise, you'll never look at cookies the same way again.