Christina Tosi Gives Us The Scoop On Milk Bar's New Twix-Inspired Candy Bar Sundae

Birthday cakes stuffed with bright orange Cheetos seasoning, ice cream soaked in cornflakes cereal, and cake truffles filled with taco shells ... it's always an adventure guessing what chef Christina Tosi and the flavor team at Milk Bar will come up with next. You can order a wide selection of Milk Bar's playful and eye-catching naked cakes online, as well as most of the bakery's line of pies, cookies, and cake truffles. The iconic Cereal Milk ice cream is even available at grocery stores everywhere. But for a taste of one of Milk Bar's special soft serve sundaes, you'll need to visit one of the bakery's 11 brick-and-mortar locations in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, or Bellevue, Washington. We recently chatted with Tosi about Milk Bar's newest seasonal sundae and then headed to the bakery's flagship location in New York City for a taste of the new treat.

As part of the menu of fall desserts that launched this month, Milk Bar is offering a special Candy Bar Sundae, available now through November 26 (or while supplies last). Like Halloween trick-or-treating for grown-ups, the sundae flavors pull inspiration from those coveted bags of candy bars that were worth their weight in gold growing up. "It's like an inside-out candy bar," Tosi tells us in an exclusive interview. "Kind of like a love letter to a Twix." Luckily, you won't have to trade away your last Snickers bar to get a taste of this nostalgic sundae.

The Candy Bar Sundae hits all the same flavor notes as the beloved candy bar it's based on. It all starts with a scoop of shortbread crumbs in the bottom of the cup before getting filled with Milk Bar's chocolate fudge soft serve ice cream, more shortbread cookie crumbs, and salted caramel sauce on top. "It's shortbread crumb, caramel sauce, and then basically, the soft serve ... tastes like the chocolate of a candy bar," says Tosi. The sundae gets an artisan upgrade to the Twix bar we all know and love with handmade toppings, each created in-house at the Milk Bar bakeries with classic shortbread and caramel ingredients.

According to Tosi, the salted caramel sauce is made the traditional way, with sugar, heavy cream, butter, vanilla, and salt. It begins as a dry caramel — meaning that the sugar is heated and caramelizes without water or syrup — before the rest of the ingredients are added. "A little bit of butter and heavy cream gives it fluidity, and then a good amount of vanilla," Tosi says. 

The key ingredient that makes the caramel sauce really pop is actually the vanilla. "Most people don't know that [vanilla] really contextualizes the dried caramel part of sugar. If you don't have that vanilla and that butter, your brain doesn't think 'caramel,'" she explains. After tasting the sundae, we can't help but agree that the caramel sauce is an especially flavorful addition to the Candy Bar Sundae.

The Candy Bar Sundae is just one option on the soft serve menu available in stores. You'll also find the OG Cereal Milk soft serve, which you can even swirl together with the chocolate fudge soft serve. In fact, the Cereal Milk sundae is a staple on the Milk Bar menu and is made with the Cereal Milk soft serve and cornflake crunch toppings. In addition to the shortbread crumbs and cornflake crunch, you can also add chocolate crumbs, birthday crumbs, and sprinkles. Sauces include both the salted caramel and a fudge sauce. A cup of soft serve costs $7, and a pint costs $13, with additional toppings available for $1.50 each.

If you're especially excited about Milk Bar's sundae options, you can even go a step further and create your own DIY pint for $16, which includes your choice of soft serve, sauce, and toppings, as well as a selection of cake. The cake options include B'Day (confetti cake), double chocolate, and vanilla.

In addition to the limited-time Candy Bar sundae, Milk Bar is welcoming fall with the return of the Pumpkin Coffee-Cake Cake and Pumpkin Coffee-Cake Cake Truffles, available in stores and online, and the very limited XL Gooey Marshmallow Batter Brownie at the NYC and LA flagship locations this month exclusively.