Four years ago, I made a lot of black and white cookies for a party with a "Jewish New York" theme and I haven't revisited the cookie since. At least not until the black and white cookie recipe from Baked Explorations showed up this week on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule.
This recipe is pretty straightforward. You cream butter and sugar, mix in eggs and an egg yolk, alternately add dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt) and buttermilk, and then stir in vanilla and lemon zest. You scoop out the cookies (I used a #24 scoop and got 30 cookies per batch) and bake. Once the cookies are cool, you spread on black and white frosting. The white frosting contains powdered sugar, milk, cream, and vanilla; the black frosting is the white version plus some cocoa powder and water.
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I thought that the plain, unfrosted cookies were quite delicious. These cookies are basically small cakes, and they were soft, moist, and had a lovely lemon flavor that reminded me a bit of a madeleine. The cookie itself was definitely tastier than the base cookie from the black and white recipe I made four years ago; that recipe has a vanilla cookie with lemon frosting, so the cookie on its own doesn't have the same bright lemon taste. Honestly, I would happily eat these cookies plain.
That said, the frosting adds a lot and I loved both the vanilla and chocolate halves. I had to thin out the chocolate frosting with a lot of water to get it to the proper consistency where it would dry smooth and glossy. The vanilla frosting appeared to harden as it dried, but the following morning when I packed the cookies between sheets of wax paper to take them to work, I discovered that it was not actually completely set. As a result, the white frosting got a little dented during transport, but the damage was fairly minor and cookies still looked okay. The chocolate frosting was firm and held up perfectly. In the future, I would thin out the vanilla frosting a little to make sure it fully sets, because not being able to stack cookies for storage is a huge pain.
I cannot say enough good things about these cookies. Their wonderfully soft and moist texture, combined with the lemon, vanilla, and chocolate flavors, makes for an absolutely delightful treat. And besides being delicious and beautiful, they're easy to make. You really couldn't ask for more!
Recipe: "Black and White Cookies" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
Previous Posts:
This recipe is pretty straightforward. You cream butter and sugar, mix in eggs and an egg yolk, alternately add dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt) and buttermilk, and then stir in vanilla and lemon zest. You scoop out the cookies (I used a #24 scoop and got 30 cookies per batch) and bake. Once the cookies are cool, you spread on black and white frosting. The white frosting contains powdered sugar, milk, cream, and vanilla; the black frosting is the white version plus some cocoa powder and water.
.JPG)
That said, the frosting adds a lot and I loved both the vanilla and chocolate halves. I had to thin out the chocolate frosting with a lot of water to get it to the proper consistency where it would dry smooth and glossy. The vanilla frosting appeared to harden as it dried, but the following morning when I packed the cookies between sheets of wax paper to take them to work, I discovered that it was not actually completely set. As a result, the white frosting got a little dented during transport, but the damage was fairly minor and cookies still looked okay. The chocolate frosting was firm and held up perfectly. In the future, I would thin out the vanilla frosting a little to make sure it fully sets, because not being able to stack cookies for storage is a huge pain.
I cannot say enough good things about these cookies. Their wonderfully soft and moist texture, combined with the lemon, vanilla, and chocolate flavors, makes for an absolutely delightful treat. And besides being delicious and beautiful, they're easy to make. You really couldn't ask for more!
Recipe: "Black and White Cookies" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
Previous Posts:
- "Black and White Cookies: Ready for the Party!," February 6, 2009.
- "Can Anyone Help Out an Asian Girl from Nebraska?," January 26, 2009.
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