If you are a super fan of Milk Bar's cakes and cookies, you should definitely make these compost cookies, like an "everything but the kitchen sink cookie" but better, with coffee grinds, pretzels, potato chips, chocolate, oats, and chocolate chips!
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What are compost cookies
The compost cookies sold at Milk Bar are very similar to kitchen sink cookies, or everything-but-the-kitchen-sink cookies. They are next level chocolate chip cookies, loaded with your favourite snacks. The idea is to use the tail ends of ingredients and snacks leftover in your pantry to make compost cookies, thus the name. Waste not, want not! The same goes for Tosi's compost pound cake, made with butterscotch morsels, mini chocolate chips, pretzels, potato chips, oats, and more! Anything goes and all roads lead to yummy salty-sweet cakes and cookies.
It's amazing how Christina Tosi can pull together ingredients like coffee grinds and potato chips and then turn them into delicious cookies. I find her truly inspiring how she recycles cake scraps to make birthday cake truffles. The compost cookie recipe comes from her book: Milk Bar available on Amazon. I especially love the note in the sidebar for the compost cookie recipe where Tosi tells readers to use fresh coffee grinds and not those leftover from your morning's brew. Makes me laugh.
The pantry odds and ends that I stuffed into this recipe include semi-sweet chocolate chips (instead of mini chocolate chips), white chocolate chips (instead of butterscotch morsels), oats, graham cracker crumbs (turned into Tosi's graham cracker crust recipe, as instructed) and potato chips. I didn't have pretzels so I skipped them, but if you want to skip them, use double the potato chips!
I think the best part of this recipe is the cookie dough itself. Obviously, we all love traditional unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough, but this one is even better. I don't know if it's the graham cracker crust, or the potato chips. I've added coffee grinds to coffee and raspberry bread pudding with much success, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the coffee grinds added so much flavour to this cookie recipe. I contemplated turning off my phone and settling down on the couch with the Kitchenaid mixer bowl of cookie dough in my lap, spoon in hand.
If and when you get around to baking the chilled cookie dough, you will end up with crispy-edged jumbo cookies with the perfect balance of salty and sweet. The coffee grinds add a certain mocha flavour to them, but I find every bite of cookie is a wonderful surprise.
If you love to eat chocolate chip cookies, make these cookies, and buy the book they came from: Milk Bar available on Amazon. Seriously.
Compost cookie recipe
This recipe is adapted from the recipe in Tosi's book, with changes to the compost add-ins, among other things. If you are a fan of Momofuku Milk Bar, then try making the Milk Bar birthday cake, the Milk Bar birthday cake truffles, and this blackberry almond cake too!
📖 Recipe
Milk Bar Compost Cookies
Ingredients
Graham crust ingredients
- 95 grams graham cracker crumbs ¾ cup
- 10 grams nonfat dry milk powder 2 tbsp
- 13 grams granulated sugar 1 tbsp
- ¼ teaspoon Diamond Crystal fine kosher salt
- 28 grams unsalted butter 2 tbsp, melted
- 27 grams whipping cream (35 % fat) 2 tbsp
Compost cookie ingredients
- 225 grams bleached all-purpose flour 1 ⅓ cups
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon baking soda
- ¾ teaspoon Diamond Crystal fine kosher salt
- 250 grams mini chocolate chips 1 ¼ cups
- 85 grams graham crust (½ recipe above) ½ cup
- 50 grams mini pretzels 1 cup
- 50 grams white chocolate chips ¼ cup
- 43 grams rolled oats (or large flake oats) ⅓ cup
- 2 ½ tablespoon ground coffee beans
- 50 grams potato chips 2 cups
- 225 grams unsalted butter 1 cup, room temperature
- 200 grams granulated sugar 1 cup
- 150 grams light brown sugar ¾ cup
- 50 grams Wilton glucose 2 tbsp
- 1 large egg(s)
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Instructions
To make the graham crust
- Stir together the dry ingredients in a medium bowl with a fork to evenly distribute them.
- In a small cup, whisk together the butter and cream. Add this to the dry ingredients and continue mixing with a fork. Eventually the mixture will form clumps (see photo). If it doesn’t, you will need to add more melted butter, by ½ tablespoon amounts until it clumps.
- Store in an airtight container. You will use half this recipe for the compost cookies.
To make the compost cookies
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set the dry ingredients bowl aside.
- In another medium bowl, place the chocolate chips (white and semi-sweet or whatever you are using), graham crust, pretzels, oats, ground coffee, and potato chips. You don’t need to mix them. These are your add-ins for later.
- In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and glucose on medium-high for 2 minutes.
- Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the egg and vanilla. Beat this mixture for 7 to 8 minutes.
- Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the whisked dry ingredients. Mix until the dough is just combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Don’t overmix.
- On low speed, dump in the add-ins, and mix until they are just combined into the dough, about a minute or so.
- Scoop the dough by ⅓ cups onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Pat down the scoops a little and refrigerate overnight.
- When the dough is completely chilled, bake the cookies (3 per sheet or spaced about 4 inches apart because they spread quite a bit) in a 375°F (190 °C) oven for 18 minutes or until the edges of the cookies are golden but the centers are still very light.
- Cool completely before serving.
Annie says
You are obviously some kind of freak if you can keep two bags of potato chips for "months" without eating them.
Cindy says
Beautiful pictures you've got there!
Baker Street says
YUM! These sound incredible! It has everything from potato chips to coffee beans. The layers of flavor in these must be just divine.
Kiri W. says
I am so scared of chips in cookies! But I am intrigued and would love to try one.
Steph says
These sound like the perfect combination of sweet and salty!
Red_Shallot says
Interesting ingredients but from the look of it, I bet they're delicious!
Joanne says
Delish! I have a recipe for potato chip cookies (no compost 😉 ). They make a great "jar" cookie so you can gift the mix in a jar to be baked later. But as for the cookie?! There is something about chips that work wonders in a recipe.
Charlotte says
These sound so dangerously good...
Juanita says
Those have got to be some of the weirdest cookie ingredients I've seen in a while 🙂
My Cake Porn says
I just bought this book 2 days ago and I can't wait to bake everything out of it, so amazing! Good to hear that they taste as wonderful as they sound, thanks for sharing!