Make Ahead

This is our high-brow fudge sauce for the Earl Grey lovers out there (Mama Meehan, we’re looking at you).

I wasn’t raised on malt as a flavor, but as we expanded our little kitchen staff, Leslie Behrens opened us up to a world of malt. After many attempts at this sauce, we found the secret to a deep, dark underlying malt flavor is a splash of molasses—not enough to taste molasses, but enough to give a deep, dark depth beyond chocolate alone.

Our grasshopper pie is like a brownie pie that got drunk on crème de menthe.

Our most successful new offering in 2010 was our cake truffles, spawned entirely from leftovers. We had once served slices of cake to order, but after hemming and hawing with our endearing staff of counter employees over the correct way to slice and serve a multilayered cake, we decided to get smart. Helen and Leslie were the catalyst behind convincing me to make cake truffles with all of our leftover cake and cake layering scraps. Now, instead of committing to a whole slice of cake, you can get a bite or two or three. You can choose to follow the recipe, or get crazy, without our guidance, using leftovers to concoct your own. Don’t limit yourself to carrot cake; you can use any cake scrap and any leftover fillings, crumbs, or crunches. Chocolate Chip Cake (page 94) scraps with Fudge Sauce (page 136) and ground Peanut Brittle (page 169) couldn’t be anything but a success.

My mama is a busy, busy woman. If she were baking this cake, she would probably opt to buy preshredded carrots from the grocery store. She likes baking shortcuts and, in this case, it’s quite possible she doesn’t know where her box grater is (or if the handle is still attached to it). I’m not going to lie. I’ve bought preshredded carrots, and the results weren’t one bit terrible. But at the farmers’ market, they’ve got yellow carrots and purple carrots and orange carrots that actually taste like something. And they will make your cake better if you use them.

One of our favorite things to do is to make a frosting with an unexpected flavor. For this one, we puree graham crust down to a liquid form and then paddle it into whipping butter with a little seasoning.

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.

Once we got birthday cake crumbs down, we moved on to our larger quest of making a funfetti cake, canned frosting and all, from scratch. Turns out that looking on the side of the cake mix box at the monster ingredient list was really helpful in getting the “secret” stuff we couldn’t figure out by taste.

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.