My Ooey Gooey Butter Biscoff Cookie Tastes Like Jeni's Buttery Ooey Gooey Ice Cream

Christina Tosi, Chef for Milk Bar Bakery in New York, was offering a virtual 30-day baking challenge and I bit! Once I realized that I would get a peek inside how her brain works while developing flavor profiles, I was all in.

 This is exactly what is going on in these videos. Tosi walks you through her Cornflake-Chocolate Chip-Marshmallow Cookie recipe as you bake along with her. You learn her method of breaking down flavors to create a recipe. That will include looking at your fats, flours, sugars, extracts, sub-recipes, (we will get back to this later) and add ins.

She starts with the fat which is always unsalted cultured butter. The reason is the flavor. The milk that is used for the butter has added cultures. This thickens the milk and develops wonderfully tangy flavor notes of buttermilk and hazelnuts.

Tosi then challenges you to think about other fats to substitute, like peanut butter, cream cheese, browned butter or even duck fat.

She asks you to imagine what flavors you want your dough to taste like with the choice of sugars. What combination tells your flavor story- white granulated, light brown, dark brown, honey, or glucose?

The intriguing part of this process for me was the possibility of grinding ingredients into a powder form and substituting it for some of the flour in the recipe. Her grinding ingredients include biscoff cookies, graham crackers, pretzels and freeze-dried corn.

Tosi then introduces the concept of “sub-recipes” which are additional recipes that are folded into the original cookie dough. WHAAAT!? This step is mind blowing and shows off her genius ideas for flavor.

She has developed sub recipes for a pretzel crunch, cornflake crunch, Ritz cracker crunch, yellow cake mix crumbles, brownie mix crumbles and so many more.

There is a formula for crumbs and crumbles and she challenges you to create your own.

This process of making up your own original cookie recipe gets the wheels turning on the right side of your brain. I cannot tell you the last time I had this much fun thinking up ingredients to buy so I could chop, bake and crumble to fold into a cookie dough.

You are given permission to go up and down the snack aisle at the grocery store to buy salty chips, cookies, nuts, cake mixes, powdered drink mixes, bags of candy and assorted flavors of baking chocolates. Head into the kitchen and cover them with milk powder, melted butter, sugar and salt and bake them up into a ridiculously tasty treat to go into your cookie dough.

The final step is prototyping your dough. You make several different flavors of cookie dough, open up the add in snacks you bought and start mixing and matching to create your original cookie recipe. Bake off one cookie idea at a time. Then make more and bake them off until you are pleased with the flavor of the cookie.

I created three versions of dough, crumbles and add ins for my Buttery Ooey Gooey Biscoff Cookie Recipe.

Version 2 won hands down!

I then made two peanut butter cookie doughs and 8 prototypes of using various add ins and sub-recipes. I whittled it down to my two favorites. My Smacking Good Cookie made with peanut butter dough, pretzel crunch and Reese’s Pretzel Cups. The second one is Peanutty Buddy made with Peanut Butter, Pretzel Crunch and chopped Peanuts.

It was an invigorating and delicious experience which required me to start eating cookie dough at 7:00 am, which is not a bad breakfast. 

Stay tuned …next week we start Pies.