Black & White Cookies ~ NYC Bakeshop Delight

Black & White Cookies ~ NYC Bakeshop Delight
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Black & white cookies are simple and fun make. They are a NYC bakeshop delight, and if you want to read about its origins you can do so by clicking here. They start with cake flour, double sifted with baking powder and salt. If you do not have cake (pastry) flour, you can easily substitute all-purpose flour by removing one tablespoon from every cup the recipe calls for, and replacing it with cornstarch. Because these ingredients must be sifted together twice, it is easiest to use two sheets of waxed paper.

Sifted cake flour

Combine Wet Ingredients

For the best black & white cookies use soft, unsalted butter. Cream it together with the sugar…this is a standard practice for most butter based cakes and cookies. Add the sugar slowly and scrape the sides of the bowl often. Your mixture should be light and fluffy. Then add in the egg, lemon zest and vanilla. Like most recipes calling for eggs, use them at room temperature. When eggs are cold and other ingredients are not, they tend to curdle and form greasy pockets after they are baked.

Creaming butter for black & white cookies

Portioning

After adding the flour mixture alternately with the milk in three or four stages, drop portions of the batter onto a parchment lined baking sheet. I like these cookies large, so I use 1/3 cup batter for each cookie. You can make them smaller, but this will affect the baking time (they won’t take as long). I arrange four dollops on each baking sheet in a zigzag fashion to make room for expansion. Dip your finger into some cold water and flatten each dollop down slightly–these cookies won’t flatten out enough if you just bake them as is.

Black & white cookies dough
Baked black & white cookies

Frosting The Cookies

The fondant is as easy as mixing confectioner’s (icing) sugar with some vanilla and water. Best advice—add the water slowly and mix vigorously—you want this frosting to be quite thick. To save a little dish washing, you can whip up the white frosting, spread them onto each half of the cooled cookies, then add cocoa powder into the same bowl to “chocolatize” it. You will need to add a little more water (again, bit by bit!) and scrape the bowl well until every trace of white frosting has dissipated into chocolate.

White fondant
Spreading chocolate fondant

This is when your black & white cookies come to life! Don’t worry about making the sides perfect—just let that frosting drip down through the wire rack. I like to let them dry for a couple of hours, and the frosting will become quite hard. Because I make my black & whites so large, I wrap them individually in plastic. If you are making many small ones, be sure to store them in an airtight container between sheets of waxed paper or parchment.



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