Continuing her New York adventure, our columnist scours the city’s best sweet-treat shops and ends up eating her way through her childhood

Remember the frst time you ate a marshmallow and thought you had ingested an actual cloud? To an adult palate, that same sweet-shop classic tastes less euphoric and more like a collection of E additives, synthetic colour and chemicals. But pop one of Three Tarts’ handmade vanilla marshmallows into your grown-up mouth and the experience of biting down on a beautiful miracle returns.

Similarly, Snowdays on 7th Avenue shaves cream into paper thin fakes on a huge rotating blade and serves it with lovingly crafted toppings. The shaved coconut cream drizzled with salted caramel and topped with shards of vanilla wafer is everything you ever dreamed snow should taste like.

OVER IN THE EAST VILLAGE, Momofuku Milk Bar is the legendary, edgy bakery that invented birthday cake truffes: tiny balls made from the leftover scraps from their perfect birthday cake, crumbed and mixed with vanilla milk, rolled in white chocolate and then covered in a sweet speckled sand. They taste exactly like you remember your eighth birthday cake did, even though it probably didn’t. In the ice cream department, Momofuku’s bestseller is ‘cereal milk’ – made from the liquid left in your bowl after you’ve fnished your Frosties – and it still tastes as delightful as it did when you secretly picked up your cereal bowl to slurp up the milk and got most of it down your neck.

Pasticceria Rocco is an Italian family bakery famous for its rum baba – a cake I used to ask for when my dad took me out for tea, as I thought it made me sound like I drank alcohol aged 10. Rocco’s rum babas are so juicy, so rum-soaked, so light and so delicious that I now can’t go without one for more than a few days. Seriously better than the ones we used to get at the ‘grumpy lady café’ in Swiss Cottage.

SO NOW HERE WE ARE IN NEW YORK creating new food memories for my children. This week was my youngest son’s 12th birthday and, bizarrely, he doesn’t like cake. I bought some tubs of uncooked cookie dough from a Manhattan company started by a gluten-intolerant designer, who gave up the rat race to produce the one thing that had made her happiest during her childhood.

We ate it straight from the tub for breakfast – her signature chocolate-chip dough, holiday cake batter and oatmeal M&M’s cookie dough – without fear of tummy ache as they somehow contain no raw egg. And for his birthday tea, I ordered a Rice Krispies cake lovingly made by Brooklyn baker MisterKrisp. It was luscious: just like, but frankly better than, the ones made by six year olds for the cake stalls at school fairs which only get bought by their parents.

It’s been a delicious mission – and I salute those adventurous Manhattan chefs who put goat into their ice cream and sage leaves into their brownies. But the tastes that go deep, the ones that you mention to your friends when you get home from foreign travels, tend to be the ones that hit an area in your stomach and heart called ‘reminds me of my youth’.

Emma’s uncooked cookie dough recipe