Guess What I've Been Doing This Month!

If you guessed that I've been taking a baking class online, you're right!! My mom signed us up because she thought it would be a fun thing to do together after she'd had to spend so much time away from us being at the hospital after my new sister was born. Our class was taught by Christina Tosi, who is the owner, founder and chef of Milk Bar, which is a famous bakery. The original one is in New York, and we first went there a long time ago. There's a newer one in Harvard Square near where we live, but I haven't been to that one yet. Now that I kind of know Christina, maybe I'll go!!!! You can learn more about Christina and Milk Bar by watching the Chef's Table episode about her. Chef's Table is a really good show where you learn all about famous chefs!

Christina is a great pastry chef and has actually won two James Beard awards, but my family has never loved Milk Bar that much. But one of the many things that we learned from taking this class is that her recipes are actually AMAZING when you make them yourself at home. It really shows you how much better home baking is than anything that is mass produced for a chain, even if it's made from a really great place.

We got a whole list of equipment and specialty ingredients that we had to order before the class started. We already had a lot of the stuff, but there was also a lot that we'd never used before and some of it that we'd never even heard of! When the box arrived with everything that we ordered, it was really big!!

The class was organized into three sections. For each section, we made a famous Milk Bar recipe and then had to make up our own recipe in the same category. This was totally new for us because we've never really created our own recipes before, but I was excited to try it. I have a whole notebook of recipes that I've kind of made up, but I've never actually tried any of them before.

The first section of the class was Cookies. First we made the Milk Bar Cornflake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow Cookies. Christina's recipes all have sub-recipes in them. They're recipes where you make something that then goes into the main recipe. For these cookies, first we had to make a cornflake crunch, that eventually got mixed into the cookie dough.

These cookies were unbelievably good! They were crispy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle and soooo delicious.

These cookies were really special!

When it came time to make up our own recipes, Christina had us start by creating a "flavor story." For our cookie recipe, Christina had us choose a time as our inspiration. We chose my younger sister's preschool graduation, which is called Fly Away. We had vanilla cupcakes and customized oreo cookies there and so we wanted to create a cookie that combined the flavors of oreos and vanilla cupcakes.

One really interesting thing that we learned from this class is that you can grind up almost anything and use it as a replacement for flour. So for our cookies, we broke apart oreos and ground the chocolate cookie part in the processor.

It was really loud when we ground these up and my mom was worried that it would wake my baby sister, but she pretty much sleeps through everything!

Then we mixed our cookie crumbs with regular flour to make a special oreo flour!

We also decided that if you could replace some of the flour, maybe you could replace some of the butter too, and so we decided to use some of our oreo filling as fat in the cookie batter! We used butter and cream cheese too.

As you know, I'm a frosting girl and so I DEFINITELY think that the filling is the best part of the oreo!

Voila! This is what our cookies looked like!

But since we were trying to combine oreo and vanilla cupcake flavors, we decided that we should use buttercream to make sandwich cookies. So we made oreo buttercream!

We had to make everything multiple times to perfect the recipe and the first time we tried this everyone else thought it was way too sweet. I never think that - ha ha! But we increased the salt for our next batch and everyone liked it better.

Then we piped the buttercream between the cookies to create our sandwiches.

And these were our Fly Away Sandwich Cookies!!

The next section of the class was Pie! The first recipe that we made was Milk Bar Pie. Milk Bar Pie used to be called Crack Pie and it was one of the recipes that made Milk Bar really famous when it opened. But they changed the name because crack is an illegal drug that has made lots of people really sick and so they apologized after they realized that it isn't funny to joke about. I'm glad that they changed the name. Sometimes I see people addicted to drugs living outside near where my mom works and I think that's really sad.

The first step to making Milk Bar Pie is to make a giant oat cookie. You end up just grinding up the cookie to go into the crust, but we want to bake these just as regular cookies sometime because this was delicious!

This was enough oat cookie to make two crusts and the pie was so good that we ended up making a second pie almost right after we finished the first!

We ground up the cookie to make the crust.

It was fun pushing it in. I like press in crusts more than rolling pastry dough because I think they're tastier and I like that they can add different flavors depending on what you grind up.

The filling was made with lots of ingredients, but one of them was freeze dried corn powder. We couldn't find the powder to buy, so we just bought freeze dried kernels and ground them up ourselves. Corn might sound weird in a pie, but it gave amazing flavor!

This is the filling once it was baked and set.

A very interesting part of making this pie is that after it is baked, you freeze it overnight!

Then you dust it with confectioners sugar and slice it, but you keep it and serve it cold.

One of my favorite things about this pie is that the pieces are firm, so you just pick them up and eat them like slices of pizza! We brought one of these pies to the beach on my dad's birthday and it was perfect because we just kept the sliced pie cold in a cooler with ice and then it was easy to serve and eat.

I really like how the filling in this pie goes all the way to the edge.

Usually when people think of pie, they think of a pastry crust and a traditional filling, either fruit or another common pie like pumpkin, pecan, coconut cream or lemon meringue. One of the things that I really liked about making this pie is that it ended up being very different from the kinds of pie that most people are familiar with.

Then it came time to make our own pie! This time, our flavor story was supposed to be based on a place. The place that we ski in Montana has little huts all over the mountain, filled with candy and other snacks. They're called Sugar Shacks, and I decided that I wanted to bake a pie based on that. I thought that the Sugar Shack idea would be especially good for a pie because we could do different layers, to incorporate the flavors of different snacks that they have in the Sugar Shacks.

My mom's favorite Sugar Shack snack is to mix pretzels and wasabi peas. We decided that wasabi peas probably wouldn't be great in a pie, but we thought that pretzels would be perfect for our crust because we could grind them up. And we decided to add in roasted peanuts too because lots of our favorite Sugar Shack candies have peanuts in them. Just like we used the oat cookie mixture to add flavor to our Milk Bar Pie, we used pretzels and peanuts to create a crust flavor in our own pie.

It took us a while to get the right mix of ground pretzels and peanuts and melted butter, so that the crust wasn't too crumbly. But we figured it out eventually!

Next we made a peanut butter filling. We used peanut butter and mixed it with cream cheese, confectioners sugar, vanilla and whipped cream to lighten it.

This filling was fantastic. I might increase the peanut butter a bit more the next time we make it.

We also made a caramel peanut sauce. We based this layer on part of a dessert that my Grandma Linda makes that is supposed to taste like a Snickers candy bar because we definitely have Snickers in the Sugar Shacks!

I thought that this mixture looked delicious.

We filled the crust with our peanut butter layer and let it chill in the fridge.

Do you like my ring? I made it myself and my mom loves it!

Then we topped the cream cheese layer with our caramel peanut mixture.

We had to let the caramel mixture cool so that it wouldn't melt the peanut butter filling.

Our last layer was a marshmallow whipped cream. Usually we make our own marshmallow meringue for toppings, but for this we just mixed marshmallow fluff into whipped cream and it worked perfectly!

We spread the marshmallow whipped cream over the caramel and topped the pie with chopped chocolate covered pretzels, peanut butter cups and butterfingers candy bars (sorry TaTa!)!

And that is how you make Harper's Original Sugar Shack Pie!If you want the recipe, just let me know! I already asked my mom if we could make it again for my birthday!! My dad said that this was one of the best things we'd ever made and that we could sell them. The only problem with it is that the pie is very messy when you slice it. But we also thought that you could use all the same components but layer it into jars for a jar dessert. I think those would be fun to serve at a party!

The third section of our class was cake. First we made Milk Bar's Birthday Layer Cake. This recipe had four components: the cake (Christina calls this layer the sponge), a soak, a crumb and a frosting. We had to use a bunch of new ingredients that we hadn't baked with before for this recipe, including glucose syrup and citric acid. We also used clear vanilla extract. I didn't even know that was a thing before! But according to Christina, dark vanilla has more depth of flavor and is heavier but clear vanilla is lighter and just brings out vanilla flavor.

The first thing that we made was the crumb.

We had to save them to use in the recipe, but these crumbs were delicious! I bet they'd be really good on top of ice cream!!

Then we baked a Birthday Cake Sponge. It was basically a funfetti cake, but it is very soft. You bake it in a quarter sheet pan and then use a cake ring to cut out circles of it that get layered into the cake ring with a sheet of acetate to hold the higher layers all together.

We couldn't fit three full circles when we were cutting out our cakes, so for our bottom layer we just pressed smaller pieces together and it ended up working out just fine.

We forgot to take a picture, but we made a soak with milk and vanilla that got drizzled over each cake layer. Then we made buttercream that we layered on top of the cake and the crumb.

We layered everything in the acetate (which got kind of messy) and then, just like the Milk Bar Pie, it all sets in the freezer.

The final cake was fantastic. Everybody LOVED it!!!!!

Our layers could have been a little bit neater, but we were rushing to get out of the house when we were finishing it and I still thought that it looked really good.

Then our final project was to create our own cake recipe. This time our flavor story had to be based on a specific food. We were supposed to create a recipe that highlighted the flavor of our inspiration food and then also incorporate other ingredients to highlight it.

We decided to make a cake highlighting sponge candy. Sponge candy is popular where my mom grew up in Western New York, which is how I know about it. It's called honeycomb toffee in other parts of the country. The inside is light and crispy and crackly and tastes like caramel or toffee. I like how it actually looks like a sponge!

We decided that heath bars would be a good ingredient to highlight the sponge candy flavors and so we baked a heath bar cake for our sponge.

Then we made a caramel sauce for our soak.

And we made a second caramel sauce that became the base for a caramel buttercream.

First we layered the sponge in the cake ring and acetate.

This cake was very soft with chunks of heath bar in it.

Then we spooned on our caramel soak.

We used a crushed sponge candy layer to add crunch.

We covered the sponge candy with our caramel buttercream and then repeated the entire layering process two more times. Then we put the entire cake into the freezer to set.

This is what our final cake looked like. I was really proud of it!

And this is what it looked like sliced.

If we make this cake again, I think I'll add more salt to the buttercream. It was very sweet. My dad thought that we should add more caramel and less buttercream, but I worry that more caramel might just turn the whole thing into a wet goopy mess!

Overall, I'm so happy that we took this class. I learned lots of different ways to find inspiration and how to make my own recipes. And I learned new techniques that I think I'll be able to keep using in my baking. Let me know what you think of our creations!!!!