Silicone is Best

My office thinks I'm trying to make them fat. I'm not really. I'm trying to keep myself from getting fat. It's not malicious, it's just selfish. I like to make savory things and I'm even getting the hang of this baking thing. The problem is, if I leave that stuff hanging out in my apartment, with only Will and myself to eat it, it's going to get eaten. Upside Down Pear Cake for dinner suddenly seams like a GREAT idea. And so I bring the food in, and it is eaten, and amongst the "Thanks for the treats!" emails I always get one or two about how I'm trying to sabotage a diet or two. Funny, that didn't stop my office from giving me a lovely gift certificate to the Broadway Panhandle as a wedding gift. And it certainly didn't stop me from buying equipment, taking it home, and then making the office a little something as a thank you.

I am a cookie bottom burner. The first batch will be okay, just a little dark, but every batch after that, once the oven really gets going, will come out with solid black underside. The cookie will rock, if you can deal with that slightly burnt aftertaste due to that blackened bottom. I was standing in the elevator the other week with a coworker, Jason, who had received a roll of silicone that was to be placed on a baking sheet. He regaled me with the wonders of it, the non stick surface, and the perfectly cooked cookies that came off them. I wanted to bake a perfect cookie. After my shopping trip, my new SilPat lying on my kitchen counter, I knew exactly which cookie I wanted to perfect too.

A fan of the David Chang empire--as evidenced by the great time I had at Momofuku Noodle Bar--I have long been customer of Momofuku Milk Bar. It's a little place tucked behind Momofuku Ssam Bar on East 10th St, there are tables you can lean on but no chairs, and there isn't an alcoholic drink to be had. It's one of my favorite places to take out of town guests (Holly, Mike, Amira, I'm looking at you!) because after a night of drinking in the East Village, there's something so awesome about going to a bakery that is still open at 11pm for cookies and milk. These aren't your run of the mill desserts either. There's a cookie with cornflake and marshmallow. There is PB & J soft serve. The milk is flavored to taste like cereal, so you immediately feel like you're about five years old, in your footie pajamas, sitting in front of Saturday morning cartoons while you drink it. And then there is my very favorite cookie. The Compost Cookie. It is a cookie filled with wondrous things, chips, pretzels, a true monument to the American Junk Food Diet, all in one cookie. It manages to be sweet and salty all at once, finally bringing these two distinct camps of snackers together. This is a wonder cookie. It would be mine.

Now the recipe for the Cereal Milk you can actually find on Martha Stewart's website, apparently she did a whole feature on the place. You can even find their recipe for their famous "Crack" Pie (it is the East Village after all). But the Compost Cookie, that recipe is a guarded secret, it's not even in the Momofuku cookbook I'm coveting. One intrepid blogger, however, took it upon himself to make his own knock off recipe. God bless Greg Johnson at the Oatmeal CookieBlog. When a recipe calls for "Roughly crushed" junk food, that means I get to take a bag of Fritos and beat the hell out of it. That part was fun. Since I basically didn't change this recipe at all, and Greg obviously did a lot of work creating it, I'm not going to repost the recipe here, you'll just have to follow this link to his site and you'll see the exact recipe I used.

They were a huge hit. I got seven "Yum" emails, and zero "Why are you doing this to me?" emails, which I will take as a double complement. One woman who had a meeting and no time to eat grabbed one and said it saved her life. Salty, sweet, a tribute to all processed food, and a life saver. You see? Wonder cookie.

Editors Note: After writing this blog an interview with David Chang was written saying that Milk Bar pastry chef Christina Tosi is working on a cookbook. I am nearly mad with joy and anticipation! Also while I have your attention, a few people have complained about how hard it is to add this blog to their RSS Feed. I have put a tool in the right hand column to make it easier! Have a great weekend all!

Good Morning Blog Readers

I'm back in the USA! It is currently 9:30pm ET, which is like 2:30am Dublin time. Yeah, you're not getting a Monday blog. Tuesday sounds like a saner idea. I will, however, make a recommendation. Between the airport, the plane into Philadelphia, and the bus to NY, I have been sustaining myself with O'Neills shortbread cookies. They kind of rock. Especially compared to plane food. Can anyone tell me how bow tie pasta and creamed spinach counts as "Vegetarian Lasagna"? Explain that to me.

Pumpin Ice Cream and Soft Ginger Cookies

I am a loyal customer to places that I have genuine affection for. I will go back for years and order the same things over and over again if there are truly dishes that make me happy. Since I was a little girl I have enjoyed the coffee and ice cream at a place known as Coffee and Cream in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. My mother would take me there after trips to the library, it has a deep nostalgia factor for me. They roast their own coffee in a huge machine by the door, so the shop always smells fantastic, and they serve local ice cream in a variety of flavors. In addition to this they also sell baked goods like cookies and bagels.
A few years ago on a chilly fall afternoon they were advertising a special, where they took one of their large ginger cookies, heated it up a bit in the microwave, and topped it with pumpkin ice cream. It was one of the most fantastic things I have ever eaten. I remembered it all year and the following October I headed back intent on ordering it again. I didn't see a sign for the special, but they had ginger cookies and they had pumpkin ice cream. I asked the girl behind the counter if she knew about the special from last year. She blinked at me.
The thing about places like this is they employ a rotating cast of teenage staffers, essential to the economy of girls 16-19 years old, but fairly useless in remembering the history of a business. I patiently explained about the cookie and the heating and the ice cream. She looked at the register in terror. "Um, let me go ask how to ring that up," and she scurried off to find the manager. What the big deal was about just ringing me up for a cookie and a scoop of ice cream I'm not sure, but eventually she got herself sorted out and I got my dessert.

I have gone to great lengths to continue to get my fall treat every year. One year I missed the window of when they had pumpkin ice cream and was nearly beside myself with grief. Since Will and I usually back and forth to New York by a bus whose station is in Doylestown, I convinced Will's parents to take us into town early to catch the bus last year, just so I could eat this desert. Each time I ordered I had to explain to the new crop of teenagers how to make this treat all over again. This year I finally decided that as a permanent resident of New York and the proud owner of an ice cream machine, I needed to stop being a slave to locale and the blank stares of teenage girls. I was getting my fall treat dammit, even if I had to make it myself.

I hunted for recipes. Now that I had conquered my fear of baking, I could handle cookies. It was especially important that the cookies be soft, so they could be broken apart with a spoon. This meant no switching out the Crisco for butter, like I did last Christmas when I produced a batch rather difficult to eat cookies on the recommendation of a Times article. I was fortunate to find a recipe on Epicurious that actually billed itself as Soft Ginger Cookies. The website failed me on a pumpkin ice cream recipe, so I had to look elsewhere. Food Network only had a recipe submitted by a viewer, not one that they had tested. I found a few more on the less rigorously tested recipe sites, and was wary. This was an important desert, not to be trifled with. That's what desserts like trifles are for. I finally found a solid looking recipe on the Williams Sonoma website, and was ready to go.
First up, ice cream. It's important to note here that little direction where the pumpkin and vanilla need to be wisked together and then chilled for 3 hours. I missed that so I didn't get started on the custard until three hours after I had meant to. Oops.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup fresh pumpkin puree or canned unsweetened
  pumpkin puree
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 5 egg yolks
• 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg (Yeah, I'll pretend I
  grated some nutmeg. Sure...)
• 1 Tbs. bourbon

Directions:
In a bowl, whisk together the pumpkin puree and vanilla. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or up to 8 hours. (Again, oops)In a heavy 2-quart saucepan over medium heat, combine 1 1/2 cups of the cream and 1/2 cup of the brown sugar. Cook until bubbles form around the edges of the pan, about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, in a bowl, combine the egg yolks, cinnamon, ginger, salt, nutmeg, the remaining 1/2 cup cream and the remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar. Whisk until smooth and the sugar begins to dissolve. Remove the cream mixture from the heat. 

Gradually whisk about 1/2 cup of the hot cream mixture into the egg mixture until smooth. Pour the egg mixture back into the pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon and keeping the custard at a low simmer, until it is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon and leaves a clear trail when a finger is drawn through it, 4 to 6 minutes. Do not allow the custard to boil.

Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl. Place the bowl in a larger bowl partially filled with ice water, stirring occasionally until cool. (See Stef, that's what the strainer should look like :P) Whisk the pumpkin mixture into the custard. Cover with plastic wrap, pressing it directly on the surface of the custard to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate until chilled, at least 3 hours or up to 24 hours. Transfer the custard to an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturers instructions. Add the bourbon during the last minute of churning. Transfer the ice cream to a freezer-safe container. Cover and freeze until firm, at least 3 hours or up to 3 days, before serving. Makes about 1 quart.

The five egg yolk thing almost made me crazy as I stared at the bowl of five egg whites that I had remaining. I use organic cage free eggs because I'm an East Coast Liberal Elitist, and those suckers aren't cheap. I solved the problem by covering the whites, sticking them in the fridge, and making a kick ass egg white omelet with mushrooms and shallots the next morning. Not being wasteful is awesome and delicious.


As the custard chilled I worked on the cookies. When I moved out my mother practically threw her Kitchen Aid standing mixer into the moving van. She had not baked since I was nine and didn't want the massive appliance in her cabinets anymore. I took it gleefully, the thing is a war horse. It's older then I am and shows no signs of stopping. I'm pretty sure I could throw a cinderblock in there and in five minutes have a smooth meringue. I have registered for the pasta maker attachment, but as my mother never used any attachments on it I'm not even sure if that part works, so I have my fingers crossed. The Kitchen Aid makes cookie making way easy, and was even able to deal with the cup of dark molasses, which is a goo that I personally was terrified of. Sticky sticky heavy goo.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup robust (dark) molasses
• 1/2 cup pure vegetable shortening (for the love of god,not butter)
• 1 large egg, beaten to blend
• 1/2 cup boiling water

Directions: Combine first 8 ingredients in large bowl. Add
molasses, shortening, and egg. Using electric mixer, beat until well blended. Beat in 1/2 cup boiling water. Chill dough 1 hour. 

Preheat oven to 400°F. Roll chilled dough by generous tablespoonfuls into balls. Roll in additional sugar to coat. Place dough balls 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake until cookies are puffed and cracked on top and tester inserted into center comes out with some moist crumbs attached, about 12 minutes (do not overbake). Transfer cookies to racks and cool.

By the time Will got home I had cookies cooling on every available surface. I probably could have halved the recipe, but my office enjoyed the leftovers. It was time to dump the custard into the ice cream maker. According to my manufacturers instructions it should churn for 20-30 minutes. By minute 18 I was a tiny bit afraid the custard was going to pour out of the machine, it was forming so beautifully. I let it churn for about 24 minutes before I decided that, no seriously, we have to turn the machine off. As always it was a bit on the soft serve side the night I made it, but the true excitement took place the next day, after it had set in the freezer overnight. Cookie warmed and ice cream scooped, it was everything I had dreamed of all year long, but without the five minutes of explaining "No, you put the ice cream on the cookie" to a girl in a Miley Cirus tee shirt. Coffee and Cream and I are still friends though. They still make me REALLY fresh roasted coffee every time I'm in town. But as far as my very favorite autumn treat--that's now self served.

Before I sign off the week I'd like readers to know the my friend and reader of this blog Evan Reehl Ryer is part of an art show at Union Gallery at 359 Broadway. I went Friday night and it's got great pieces, so I encourage those in the area to check it out!