All About Cookies: A Milk Bar Baking Book Hardcover – November 1, 2022

I'm one of those people that loves all things Tosi, because I usually find a flavor combination that I have never had before. The quality of her recipes are usually much better than most recipes I find online. So far I have not been disappointed in the quality of recipes in this book. The book starts off with her discussing her love of baking, her love of cookies, recommended ingredients, and recommended methods. The book is divided into: Sandies & Sammies, Bars, Dense & Fudges, Low Bakes & No Bakes, Snaps, Cookies that Like to Party, and Crunchies & Crispies.Potato Chip Sammie - we've all had potato chips in our cookies, and they're great, but honestly they usually get dominated by other flavors like chocolate, coffee, etc. But this cookie is like an "ode to the potato chip". It's both crisp & chewy. It's very crumbly dough, so when you cut it, you really need to patch the cookies back together. Very easy to make, and great taste.Pumpkin Dulce Bar - I'm not a huge fan of pumpkin. but this bar is a mixture of pumpkin and dulce de leche, but also has some cream cheese in it. It's really delicious, and when a baker can make me love something that I normally don't like, it's an achievement.Chocolate Peppermint Pretzel Snaps - There is nothing about this cookie that isn't amazing. Peppermint? salty pretzels? Covered in Chocolate? Yes MA'AM!MilkFlake Crisp - This one was brilliant. It's like a rice krispee square, but made with ritz crackers, and cranberry, and sesame seeds! I love tasting new flavors so unique, and this one was wonderful both taste and texture.Edit 2-27-23. Blueberry Corn bars - as with her Blueberry and corn cake from All about cake, this one was absolutely delicious. The corn powder addition to the base is wonderful and chewy and melts in the mouth. Her blueberry topping is also wonderful as it's not too sweet. It's a fresh tasting bar. The amount of compote the recipe calls for more than covers the entire cookie, which is great, but if you're looking for the "appearance" of patchs of blueberry over with the corn bar peeking through elsewhere, you will not use the entire amount of compote. I made this twice, and the picture is the 2nd time, because the first time had the entire top of each cookie covered in blueberry compote.Peachy Shortcake cookies. It's a really really really good cookie. I don't like dried peaches. They're bland, and also sour. In this cookie, though? They're delicious and they add a great texture but with a very subtle peach flavor. It's wonderful. I made these recently with chewy dried strawberries and woah.....so good!PB Sandies. These are okay. I love Peanut Butter, but I didn't like the texture of these which were extremely crumbly, due to them being gluten free (using blitzed rice krispees for "flour" instead of regular AP. I had multiple people raving about this cookie in subsequent days.Edit 3-9-2023Cherry Pie Cookies - I love anything with dried cherries in it. These cookies were slammin'. wow. The addition of a baked pie crumble made it just like eating a cherry pie. Fantastic. Just make sure you use dried cherries that are tart but also sweet.Butterscotch Pudding cookies - These are everything one could want in butterscotch. I liked them, and could taste the addition of the butterscotch pudding mix. These were good. Some people loved them very passionately, but I just liked them.Grasshopper Pie Bars - These are brownies with a cream cheese swirl, and a white chocolate drizzle. Very tasty. Lots of compliments from coworkers on these. And very moist and decadent. With just a hint of peppermint...not too overpowering.Cashew Praline Blondies - I expected to love these so much, but the addition of cashews didn't really impact the flavor too much for me. It was all about the praline flavor, which was still very very good. But some people thought I had overcooked them, as they tasted a tiny bit bitter, so I would recommend if you make them, to not take the caramel for the praline to too deep an amber color. Because you're making the praline, swirling it on top, and then baking again! So, you run the risk of overcooking the sugar. Don't get me wrong, I ate three of these bars because they're very chewy and I love blondies, but I would cook the caramel to a light amber before swirling into the batter. See attached picture of the color of the caramel I brought this to....Edit 3-28-23. Let me start by saying that holy cow the CTC Marsh cookies are so flippin' good. But then again, I knew they would be! Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is my spirit animal. Make these cookies!!!!The Caramel Apple-Walnut bars are good, but only if you really love Walnut, because these are like 95% taste of walnut. The method for creating the caramel was strange. Bring 1/4th of the sugar to a dry amber, and then add another 1/4th, etc etc, until you have a caramel. However, by the time you get to the end, it's a VERY deep caramel, and when I added the apple juice, cream, butter, etc, it was so dark it overpowered the other flavors. There is no apple taste in them, and I'm sad about that. If ever I did it again, I would just make the caramel as I normally do, stream in everything slowly, and then cook to a soft set caramel. I would also decrease the walnuts by like 20%. I'm drowning in walnuts!!!!The PB Smores are good. I'm surprised, though, that they don't include any egg. It's a very dense bar, but delicious just the same. Peanut butter, chocolate and marshmallow will always be tasty.The Brown Butter Nillas were a surprisingly bland cookie. I love brown butter more than anything, and the batch of brown butter I made was swoon-worthy. These cookies, though? meh. The recipe calls to add a second pan on top of the cookies as they bake, and as you can see from my picture, they spread out too much to the point where they had holes in them like swiss cheese. I think I would bake them differently next time. I wonder if baking them like that dried them out too much, baking out the taste of the brown butter, and making the texture not as great as they could be? hmm. I need to revisit this recipe as I know it has great potential. I suspect it was just user error on my part.4-2-23 Edit.Nana Nillas - No they're not Grandma's recipe. It's just a shortened version of BA-NANA! These cookies were awesome. I loved everything about them, even the fake banana extract flavor (which reminded me of banana laffy taffy. They taste like banana pudding. Seriously, you should make these!Cereal Milk Cream Soda Cookies - these were tasty. You do need to order Sodium Citrate from online, which gives the cream soda flavor. Instead of buying freeze dried corn, I used pre-made sweet corn powder from online here, and it didn't taste the same, or smell the same, and I wonder if the taste of these cookies were lackluster because I didn't blitz down my own corn powder. I'm going to do that for my next batch! If the taste improves I'll update this, but if not, I think this is one of the cookies you can probably skip. Update: ON the 2nd batch I made, I used corn powder from freeze dried corn that I pulverized myself, and I also used bread flour (like she recommends in her first book), and it made SUCH a difference! Much tastier. Also, I did NOT add the marshmallows to the cookie dough, as it really makes it a pain to manage these cookies when the marshmallow is underneath, etc. So, after I scooped the cookies onto the sheet, I pushed down the cookie, and then took a couple marshmallows and pressed them into the dough. Much much better this way!Pretzel Chocolate Chunk cookies - These were really good. Used both light and dark brown sugars, as well as molasses. You can really taste all the flavors. I think it needs more pretzel and chocolate chunks added, though. Some bites needed that additional pretzel or chocolate flavor.Strawberry Shortcake Cookies - These were really good cookies. I really wish, though, that I had listened to my instincts and added either chopped up dried chewy strawberries, or an equal amount of crushed (not pulverized) freeze-dried strawberries. They're good cookies, but they needed a bit more strawberry flavor.

I bought this after sending cookies to a friend from the Milk Bar website. I am so glad that I did! The cookies in this book are amazing, and there are so many new cookies to try!My first was the butterscotch pecan cookies. They were amazing, and in the words of a friend who called to tell me, "This is seriously the best cookies I have ever had! I'm not kidding!" She was right, and at 86, she has had her share of cookies. The Dulce de Leche cookies are also amazing. The recipes are clear, easy to follow, and super easy if you have a mixer. (You can make them all with a hand beater, but the bigger stand mixer made it super, super easy.)I made mine with gluten free flour, and you couldn't tell the difference in the cookies. I have put a number of the recipes into a binder with plastic sheet covers, as these will be my new holiday go-tos!

I'm excited to try these recipes. I've been eyeing this book for a long time and finally ordered it. The recipes seem unique and not overly difficult.

Yes you need a kitchen scale. It is literally easier than measuring cups, and faster, you will never look back. I don't want to make a cookie that ISN'T in this book ever again. It also has recipes that empower you to make decisions, and none of the ingredient lists are a mile long. Things are kept simple (and delicious).

I love Christina Tosi and her recipes. I have all of her books and love them. This one has lots of great recipes, don’t get me wrong. I was just expecting something different. Also, is it just me or is it weird that there is no recipe for her chocolate confetti cookie even though there are multiple pictures used throughout the book??

The recipes were relatively easy to follow. The photography is beautiful. If you enjoy baking or are looking for a gift for someone who does…this is a great purchase.

Tosi has done for cookies what she previously did for cakes. This is not a cookbook that tells you another way to make sugar cookies. If you are looking for another recipe for a cookie exchange, look elsewhere. Instead, this is a book that stretches boundaries and rethinks what cookies could be.To enjoy this book, you need to be ok with Tosi's style of taking packaged supermarket flavors (e.g., Cinnamon Toast Crunch) and incorporating them into a new generation of desserts.A very compelling book for a seasoned baker, it will make you say 'that's a good' idea on every page.

This book is absolutely gorgeous, looks great on the shelf and reads well as a causal recipe read. I have tried 4 or 5 of the recipes and don't have many good things to say. The peanut butter bars were awesome but the espresso cookies were very odd tasting and the babka cookies were both impossible to roll correctly based on instructions and tasted very sour. It's pretty expensive for a recipe book but I think it leans too much on its visual appeal and not enough on sharing recipes that are worth making.