New Yorkers, you can stop coveting Milk Bar’s newest frozen treat from afar.
Dessert innovator Christina Tosi has been keeping Las Vegas cool with MilkQuakes — essentially Milk Bar’s take on Dairy Queen’s Blizzard — since opening her first location at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas hotel in December. What’s with naming frozen treats after natural disasters tho?
Instead of crumbling up the usual store-bought cookies and candy bars, Milk Bar swirls its own in-house creations into its signature cereal milk soft serve. The so simple, so good ice cream (created by adding cornflakes, brown sugar and a touch of salt to milk!) meets pickled strawberry jam and a corn cookie in the Strawberry & Corn MilkQuake; the B’day MilkQuake is made with their birthday cake truffles and an extra dose of color from rainbow sprinkles; and Tosi inverts the pie a la mode idea with a slice of Crack Pie mixed into the Crack Pie MilkQuake.
While we’re excited whenever NYC gains a new frozen treat, Tosi was just razzing Burger King about knocking off her cereal-flavored treat concept: “Though I’m flattered at one level by the recent influx of copycatters, it should go without saying, you can never outdo an original!” she told AM New York. For the record, Dairy Queen invented swirling mix-ins into soft serve with the Blizzard in 1985. In fairness, Burger King didn’t really try very hard.
MilkQuakes be available at all Milk Bar locations beginning June 30, but you can be the first to try it today, June 29, by ordering any (or all!) of the three flavors through Caviar. We won’t tell if you choose to turn them into a three-course lunch — whatever it takes to stay cool. To make the deal even sweeter, Caviar is waiving delivery fees.
For now, when MilkQuakes do become available in stores, you’ll have to trust Tosi’s recipes. “We currently do not allow customizations/substitutions,” according to Milk Bar, “but we encourage everyone to share fantasy MilkQuake flavors for our team to experiment with in the Milk Bar test kitchen!”
What Tosi could rightly claim credit for is creating the booming food niche of cereal for adults. Since the 2008 launch of her first standalone Milk Bar location in the East Village (though early Momofuku customers were eating her cereal milk soft serve before then), we’ve gotten a Kellogg’s all-day cereal cafe in Times Square (also with recipes by Tosi), the sneaker store-cereal bar Kith in Brooklyn and Ben & Jerry’s launching cereal flavors.
