My sweet husband bought me the Milk Bar cook book for Valentine’s day. We often give each other cook books for special occasions and I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. I was excited to try out one of the recipes.

My work often takes me to Whole Foods Market and one of the more “strange” (i.e: not commonly used in baking recipes) ingredients lives right on the shelves there. It’s freeze-dried corn. (or “kern” as my Monkey calls it) I picked some up the other night and when I got home C put it through the food processor for me. You use it as sort of a fine powder roughly the texture of really fine corn meal.

I think since I had that readily available on my baker’s rack it was the recipe I chose today when I decided to make something from the book. I have a really good friend in NY and he said he loves them so that was that. I was going to make corn cookies.

The funny thing about R, in New York is that I had a dream that featured him last night. He is one of my most favorite people on the planet and we’ve had so many great times over the years. When we lived in SF there was a store on Haight St. that had a million t-shirts for sale. There was one in particular that he thought was hilarious. It was orange and had a picture of a cartoon ear of corn with a face and below it were the words:
Me So Corny

It actually was pretty funny and what my memory banks grabbed onto today as I was making the cookie dough.

I couldn’t figure out the correct sizing for the cookies. She recommends using a 1/3c. measuring cup or a #16 2 3/4 oz. scoop (which I do not own) I used the 1/3c. measuring cup and it seemed HUGE. She said the recipe makes between 12-15 cookies. In my world, that is not nearly enough cookies so I doubled the recipe, to make a more reasonable 2 1/2 dozen. The double batch ended up using the entire package of freeze-dried corn powder.

Using those calculations I was able to scoop out 30 cookies. You are supposed to scoop them out, flatten slightly and freeze covered for an hour. I used 3 sheets covered with either parchment or a silpat and covered them with plastic wrap and tossed them in the garage freezer while I took a shower and put on jammies.

I preheated the oven right at an hour even though I had told myself that perhaps I would wait until tomorrow to bake them since we have friends coming over for dinner and freshly made cookies would be nice to have. I also told myself that since I had never made the cookies before and could not vouch for their yumminess I should probably just make them tonight. 😉 And that’s what I did. I gave them plenty of space on the sheet since I had no idea how far they would spread. I also set the timer for 15 minutes instead of 18 like the book recommended because our oven runs hot.

They were done in 13 minutes and were HUGE! Almost as big as my hand! I was stunned. And pretty excited. Huge cookies are pretty awesome as long as they taste good. And these do. They are so so good. The perfect blend of salty and sweet, like a really great sugar cookie with a flavor you almost can’t place, until you realize it’s delicious sweet corn. Amazing.

I had to stack them in my cupcake holder to store because they were so freaking big. We ate enough to make me slightly queasy and I STILL have a lot of cookies. All 3 boys gave them a big thumbs up too, and were all begging for more for hours. I think this one may be a keeper, I can’t wait to try another Milk Bar recipe soon, perhaps this one?