Making Cake Truffles with Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar

*This post was made possible through the kind sponsorship of The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.

It’s not easy to become a famous chef by making desserts, and that is precisely what Christina Tosi has done big time. With her now-famous Milk Bar group of restaurants, she has turned the dessert world on its head with her amazing creations. While staying at The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas recently, I had the incredible opportunity to attend a private session making Cake Truffles with Christina Tosi. I will never look at cake the same way again.

Meeting Christina Tosi in person was the real treat, and she is extremely approachable with a great sense of humor. I mentioned watching her as a judge alongside Gordon Ramsey on the hit TV show Master Chef, because my friend Claudia Sandoval had been the winner of Season 6! Christina loved hearing how well Claudia is doing (we bonded over Claudia’s ridiculously delicious Tres Leches Cake, but that’s another story and another cookbook).

Momofuku Milk Bar

Christina puts such attention to detail into each one of her creations, and the flavor profiles are intensely delicious. She has perfected the exact right balance of flavors, textures and aesthetics to produce gorgeous cakes that taste out of this world. Her focus is on flavors, infusing different combinations into every possible ingredient that enhances them beyond their original. For example, milk is never used plain – it’s always infused with some other flavor to add another opportunity to layer flavors into what becomes a complex combination of many elements. Whatever she is doing, please keep doing it because it works!

Making Cake Truffles with Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar

The story behind Christina’s now-famous Cake Truffles is amazing, but you first have to learn how she makes her cakes. Each cake layer is baked in a rectagular baking pan, and then circles of cake are cut from the pan. (This is ingeniusly done so that Christina can be assured the cake is cooked consistently through from edge to edge.) This process leaves cake scraps leftover, and she didn’t want to waste perfectly good cake. Thus, she invented Cake Truffles.

Now so popular that she has to make extra pans of cake devoted just to Cake Truffles, these delicious creations are available in her restaurants by the single or multiple. I came home with 12, and my family devoured them by the next morning!

Birthday Cake Truffles

Here is the general process we followed to make Birthday Cake Truffles with Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar fame, under her personal direction.

1. We crumbled up a pan of birthday cake into little pieces.
2. Into the bowl of crumbles, we added some vanilla infused milk
3. We mixed the milk and crumbles together with our hands, gaining a consistency that was sticky not clumpy.
4. Using a scoop, we rolled the cake mixture into balls about the size of a ping pong ball.
5. From there, the balls were dipped in melted white chocolate mixed with a bit of coconut oil to thin out the clumping factor. The chocolate coating seals in the moist cake and creates a crunchy hard shell for added texture.
6. Then the ball is rolled in toasted birthday cake crumbs, which stick to the hardening chocolate and add a crunchy exterior.
7. The balls are set aside to cool while the process continues.

   

When all was complete, we had to taste our creations of course. They were beyond delicious.

There were three other teams at our session, all making different flavors of cake truffles. One was a chocolate brownie cake truffle, one was a salty/sweet combo of chocolate, pretzels and peanuts, and one was a lemon cake with raspberry coating that was just stupid good.

If you would like more detail, you can view the recipe for Milk Bar’s Birthday Cake Truffles on their website.

Milk Bar at The Cosmopolitan

If you don’t feel like making Cake Truffles yourself, you can always mosey up to the Milk Bar at The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas. Chef Christina has set up an awesome outpost there, where her guests sample creations beyond anything I have described here.

Now back home in my own little kitchen, I am definitely going to try this with the kids. Sophia loves to bake, and she will enjoy coming up with interesting combinations of flavors to make her own Cake Truffles. We’ll keep you posted!

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