Creative baking with Christina Tosi: cookies

I'm back! What felt like a lifetime was really only 10 days. In those 10 days, I made multiple batches of cookie dough, ate an insane amount of sugar, and worked straight through a holiday. If you've worked in a bakery, YOU KNOW what holiday weekends are like. So I'm pretty tired, but also feeling accomplished.

This course has immediately taught me something. I never felt that it was necessary to create a backstory to any recipe, hell I'd CHOOSE for things to be impersonal. And that's just about when I realized how nervous I was to put my heart into something with the chance of someone else not enjoying it the way that I did. I think that's a story for a different day, but I just never realized that it had found it's way into my baking and creative process too.

Regardless, the space for creativity that you are encouraged to give yourself is exciting. Plus, you aren't alone! There's a whole peer group of nationwide bakers who are doing the exact same thing that you are, and you all get to talk about it together.

All of my ingredients neatly weighed out the night before - who do I think I am?

So cookies. We started with the Milkbar Cornflake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow cookie recipe, and yes it is as intense as it sounds. I had a friend over while I made this first batch and while I'm adding the ingredients I hear over my shoulder, "that's a LOT of sugar". And it was - about 400g just in the dough alone. It used a technical process that was new to me, and was definitely very interesting to make. While it was a bit too sweet for even my taste, it was a great example of turning a story directly into a recipe. I completely understood how the qualities and combination of tastes related to this particular backstory that the Milkbar team created.

This first recipe helped get the gears turning by trying a Milkbar classic - but I was ready to move onto my ideas. We started with a brainstorm session, and after 10 minutes I had an entire page filled with ingredients, lines, scribbles and things pointing to other things. It was no holds barred up in here. My plan was to take the bright smell of the orange blossoms that bloom in Arizona, and translate that into a cookie. Something soft and citrus-y, with tons of the texture that Tosi is known for.

So we began! Not to give everything away, but there were a few rounds of prototyping that were shared with the peer group. All the failed ideas and a-ha moments turned the original scribbles on a butter stained piece of paper into a final recipe.

I had learned from one of my last jobs that fruity pebbles can really be traced back to orange and citrus flavors, and for the sake of truly experimenting, I went for it. With a base dough of cereal substitute and another with using lemon-y animal crackers, I went through my many combinations.

This is just the first round of prototyping!

After a while, I landed on my final recipe. How fun are those colors!

For the dough, I adapted Simply Home Cooked's snickerdoodle recipe, because I was looking for a taller and softer bake.

225 g melted butter
200 g white sugar
95 g brown sugar
1 tsp clear vanilla
1 egg yolk
1 egg
225 g flour
150 g ground animal cookies
1 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
​ 1/2 cup white chocolate chips

I followed a basic pastry cream recipe, which can be found here.

The only changes I made were that I soaked about a cup of fruity pebbles in the milk before straining and using it for the recipe. Once it was cooled, I added 1 TBSP of lemon zest and 1 TSP of lemon juice.

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Combine the butter and sugars in a mixing bowl for about a minute. Add in the vanilla and eggs, and mix again for another minute. Sift in the flour, cream of tartar, BS and BP, along with the ground animal cookies. Mix until just combined. Finally, add the white chocolate chips and give it another stir. Let the dough rest for at least an hour, or overnight.

*Prepare pastry cream before baking the cookies*
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Preheat the oven to 350 F. Roll out 3 inch balls of dough, and coat the outside in crushed fruity pebbles. Place on a baking sheet and keep them as round as possible. Bake for 13-15 minutes, until they spread but are still soft in the middle.

Let the cookies cool for 5 minutes before transferring the pastry cream into a piping bag. While the cookies are still warm, carefully inject it into the center without breaking through the bottom.

I'll be starting the next project tomorrow, and will see you back here after section 2 is done!