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Culinary adventures: Taste of famous Big Apple cookie leads to tasty baking experiments

I am always looking for unique food when I travel and a recent trip to New York City was no exception. So when Daily Herald Food Editor Deborah Pankey suggested I check out Milk Bar, the bakery-inspired dessert branch of the Momofuku restaurant group, my ears perked up. When she mentioned its famous Compost Cookie I quickly added it to my itinerary.

Upon entering Momofuku Milk Bar I could tell this was no ordinary bakery. Small plastic bottles filled with toasted cereal blends ready to be made into their famous cereal milk lined one wall. Customers purchase their cereal blend of choice and then the magic begins: behind the counter, milk is combined with the cereal which is soaked and then strained, sweetened with a little brown sugar and served. A gourmet version of my morning cereal bowl, but the cereal milk theme didn't end there, as also served soft serve ice cream that tasted as if the milk in my cereal bowl had been placed into an ice cream machine.

Other unique menu items include their signature Crack Pie, an oatmeal cookie like crust filled with a buttery caramel filling and cakes with names like Chocolate Malt, Birthday Layer and Mint Chocolate Chip Layer, all decorated with funky crumbles and in some cases sprinkles incorporated with every layer.

My mission was to find cookies and find them I did, with choices including blueberry and cream, peanut butter, corn and corn flake marshmallow. My eyes darted right to the Compost Cookie: the wrapper lists ingredients like potato chips, pretzels, ground coffee, butterscotch and chocolate chips, along with more traditional cookie ingredients like honey, molasses, oats, flour and eggs. Reading the list I understood why the word compost is included in this cookies name.

The cookie is sweet and full of flavor, with the butterscotch chips taking the lead on my taste buds, and that compost pile of ingredients works surprisingly well together. This crazy blend of ingredients started me thinking about the random items in my pantry. I couldn't wait to get home and bake up my own version. I enlisted the help of my fourth- and fifth-grade cousins, Kaleah and Amirah, in the cookie lab. We piled packages of compost-like ingredients onto the kitchen counter, along with some other items we found like toffee bits, and different types of cereal. They each started with a batch of chocolate chip-style cookie dough and added ingredients of their choice, carefully tracking measurements along the way. Kaleah and Amirah selected similar ingredients; mini butterscotch and chocolate chips, potato chips, pretzels, and crispy rice cereal, but each with different quantities creating distinctively different cookies in the end. The baking began and after numerous taste tests with family members, both recipes were considered a success and the girls named our version of the treats Kitchen Sink Cookies.

It was through this process that I confirmed I really don't care for a strong butterscotch flavor. So for my recipe I ditched the butterscotch chips in favor of oatmeal, pretzels, crispy rice cereal, toffee bits, mini-chocolate chips, espresso powder and lots of crushed potato chips. I just love the sweet and salty combination and it tasted terrific with a cold glass of milk or a cup of coffee.

We did discover the cookies harden over time and we wished we could have added a slice of bread to the cookie container, a trick used to help cookies stay moist. Just be sure you separate the bread from the cookies with a piece of parchment or waxed paper, so you don't have bread stuck to your cookies, and add a new slice when the old one dries out.

I can't tell you how much fun we had in our cookie lab. My elementary school scientists took their jobs very seriously and had great fun, but in case you don't have small scientists in your home and or don't have time to experiment, Milk Bar features its Compost Cookie recipe and many others on its web site, http://milkbarstore.com/main/, and even more in their cookbooks. And for those who might not have time to bake, you can even order Milk Bar's sweet treats online.

We learned to have fun with our food during our research, and as we put away ingredients we decided not to use in our creations, realized there are many other varieties of the kitchen sink cookie just waiting to be discovered. Perhaps the next version will contain coconut, nuts, peanut butter or even chopped candy. The possibilities are endless.

Penny Kazmier, a wife and mother of four from South Barrington, won the Daily Herald's 2011 Cook of the Week Challenge.

Penny's Kitchen Sink Cookies

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