Get Christina Tosi's Milk Bar Cake Baking Tips — and Ina Garten's 'Dirty Dessert Secret'

“Today is going to be so much fun!” Ina exclaimed. “My friend Christina Tosi, who started Milk Bar, is coming for the day; she’s just fantastic!”

After graduating from the French Culinary Institute and combining her pastry prowess with legendary New York City chefs such as Wylie Dufresne and David Chang, Christina opened her first Milk Bar in Manhattan’s East Village in November of 2008 and began to change the way all of us — not just diners reaching the end of their meal at buzzy, innovative restaurants — think about dessert.

Christina now has 10 bakeries sprinkled across the United States, from her towering flagship in Midtown Manhattan to Washington, D.C., Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. She’s won two James Beard Awards, written bestselling cookbooks and children’s books, hosts Bake Squad on Netflix and appears as a judge on MasterChef.

“There is no doubt,” Ina said, “that Christina’s made the world a sweeter place.”

“One thing I know about [Christina] is she’s a snacker, so I’m going to make smoked salmon tartines so she can kind of eat them during the day, and I’m going to make a gravlax sauce to put on top of it,” Ina said.

That gravlax sauce, a simple-but-brilliant pantry-based concoction that brings fresh ingredients to life, combines Dijon mustard, honey mustard and grain mustard — then heats up with a teaspoon of dry mustard that focuses its intensity. Combined and whisked with sugar, good white wine vinegar and olive oil, and a bit of grapeseed oil (or canola oil, another neutral add that adds unctuousness without changing the flavor of the sauce), it’s an elevated wake-up call for the rest of the tartine.

To assemble her snacks, Ina fanned fresh avocado slices (with a bit of lemon squeezed over them to prevent browning) across toasted bread, added a slice of smoked salmon to each piece, then drizzled the gravlax sauce. Finished with salt and pepper, thinly sliced red onion and fresh dill, the tartines were ready for Ina’s reunion with Christina.

One of the many reasons Ina cherishes Christina? “Do you remember that you singlehandedly saved my Boston cream pie?” she asked her friend.

“Ina,” Christina protested, “you give me far too much credit!”

“Oh no, no, no,” Ina continued. “I was working on it for six years! I got the chocolate right, I got the filling right, the cake was almost there, but it was a little dry — and you suggested a soak! I came right home, I made sugar syrup with Grand Marnier, brushed it on the cake and boom, it was perfect.” That six-years-in-the-making recipe is now immortalized in Ina’s Modern Comfort Food, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.

“Never underestimate the power of soaking your cake,” Christina replied. (This is foreshadowing.)

Like many a celebrated pastry chef before her, Christina majored in Italian and applied mathematics. Wait, what?

“I love people that make huge transitions. You were in school to be an electrical engineer — so math and electrical engineering to food. What made you do it?” Ina asked.

“I thought, I will major in the things that I am the most excited to wake up for and go to class for, and it was math,” Christina replied. “Only I sped through college so quickly, I got done and I thought, Oh my gosh, OK, it’s time to be a grown-up: What [does] someone that majors in engineering or math do for a living? And it was like, screeching halt on the car, right? And it was like, oh no, that’s not right for me!

“I knew I wanted a job that I could bounce around and be on my feet,” she continued, “and so when I sat down and had, like, the quiet conversation with myself, OK, Christina, what is it you’re going to do every single day for the rest of your life and never get sick of? and my answer was: Make cookies.”

Applied mathematics’ loss was the culinary world’s gain — though, as you’ll see, Christina’s next-level research and problem-solving skills are the foundation of her approach to Milk Bar (as seen here in Season 23 of Snack on This!).

“OK, Ina, I’m dying to know this,” Christina said. “I have this theory that whether we’re dessert people or not, everyone has a dirty dessert secret. It’s the dessert that we eat when no one else is around.”

“It’s vanilla bean ice cream!” Ina replied. “One scoop [plus] one scoop of raspberry sorbet and really good granola on top. And that’s it! And a spoon.”

“So, granola makes you a texture hound!” Christina observed.

“I am a texture hound,” Ina agreed. “I love [texture]; texture’s so important in food! It’s the best!”

Though Christina’s seemingly deconstructed birthday cake might appear to reveal its mysteries at a first glance — because she doesn’t frost its exterior, each luscious layer is right there for the ogling — there’s more to it than meets the eye. “Before we actually build the cake up, we have to make my favorite part of the cake — and it’s the birthday crumb,” she told Ina. “It’s what we decorate on the top, but we also are going to hide a little in the layers of the cake so that…”

“[You taste it] when you bite into it!” Ina exclaimed with delight. “You won me over.”

The light, sandy crumb combines light brown sugar, granulated sugar, cake flour, rainbow sprinkles and salt — plus a secret within a secret. “Here’s a really fun ingredient to it: baking powder,” Christina said. “It actually gives a little bit of acid to the cake crumb and really helps in coloring the crumb when we put it in the oven, so it’s sort of a flavor thing and a color thing.”

Christina’s cake owes its signature, almost Proustian sweetness to a variation on a classic ingredient. “OK, so this is clear vanilla extract,” she said. “It is like the creamy, dreamy, almost creamsicle-marshmallowy cousin to the dark vanilla extract; it’s very nostalgic. So, we’ll do a little bit of this and then some vegetable oil; that will be the binder of our birthday crumb.”

Clear vanilla extract: got it, will hunt it down. Since it’s for a crumb, one should probably only need…

“You’re putting a tablespoon of vanilla?!” Ina gaped.

“Girl!” Christina said with a grin. “Girl!” This trained mathematician solved for X with a big spoon.

The move that unlocked Ina’s Boston Cream Pie recipe also adds dimension to Christina’s cakes; she was speaking from long experience when she gave her friend that recommendation. “Every Milk Bar cake that we make gets a cake soak,” she told Ina. “[Here] we use a vanilla-scented milk.”

“I think of a soak as being like a syrup, but milk does the same thing?” Ina asked.

“This one is all about creamy-dreamy vanilla,” Christina explained, “so more than sugar, it wants more of a creamy note. So we’ve got milk, and then we’re going to whisk in some of that clear vanilla extract.”

“We literally use the cheapest [metal] spoons, and we make a little ladle with [them],” she continued. “I usually do two to three little spoonfuls across [each layer].”

“So, the next layer is our birthday frosting,” Christina said. “It’s creamy, it’s dreamy, it’s vanilla, but you know it’s worth every ingredient because it took us two years — TWO! — to get this [right]. We have a saying: ‘If we’re not obsessed with it, we can’t expect others to be obsessed.’ And we use that same bent spoon to get the frosting going back and forth over the surface.” (There’s a pinch of baking soda and yet another secret ingredient, citric acid, to add tanginess to the cream cheese frosting.)