The secret to black and white cookies is they are not made from cookie dough. It's cake
batter that you bake in dollops as if it were cookies, and then the glaze is basically just
Christmas cookie icing. You could use any yellow cake batter recipe you like, but the
classic New York-area black and whites I grew up eating tend to be much closer to pound
cake. Very heavy, very dense.
In fact I'm starting with my pound cake recipe. A cup of granulated sugar, 200g. A stick and
a half of softened butter, 170g. I softened that in the microwave on very low power for
just a few seconds. And I will cream that into the sugar until very fluffy. Oops, I
forgot the other half a stick. I think it helps to do this kind of thing in the narrowest
bowl that will suffice. A narrow bowl allows you to keep more of the mixture in contact
with the beaters at any given time.
It really takes a lot to get this as fluffy as it needs to be, which is why I probably
would not bother doing this without a power tool of some kind. Gotta get it to where it
kinda looks like mayonnaise. Something like that. If it's not fluffy, it'll be kinda hard
and crunchy once baked in cookie form, which is not what I'm after. I want dense yet soft.
To that end, I'll put in half a cup of sour cream, 120g. You could use any soft fermented
milk situation. I usually use buttermilk for poundcake because it lightens it a bit. But
for these cookies I don't want light. I want heavy, yet soft. Sour cream is great for that,
so is greek yogurt.
And I've got the mixture looking mayonnaise-y again, so time for eggs. Two eggs. Pretty
standard for a poundcake of this scale. I'll mix in my other wet ingredients with these.
Lots of New York bakeries traditionally use lemon juice or lemon extract here. I think
that clashes with the chocolate icing, so I'm doing a big splash of vanilla and then
a little splash of almond extract, which you could skip.
Mix that up nice and smooth and fluffy, then I can start beating in about two cups of all-purpose
flour, 240g, a little at a time so that it doesn't explode everywhere. Hey, did you know
clouds of flour dust are highly combustible? That's a thing. Look it up.
A little more flour now, and I'll put in my other dry ingredient. A quarter teaspoon of
baking soda to neutralize the acidity of the sour cream. I like acidity, of course, but
that taste just isn't traditional here, to me.
And that could be enough leavening right there, but to be safe I'm throwing in half a teaspoon
of baking powder. You normally don't need any chemical leavening in poundcake batter.
The whipped-up butter does the trick. But a cake can climb the walls of the pan as it
bakes, which stabilizes the structure as it puffs up. This batter will have nothing to
climb, so I think some chemical leavening helps keep the cookies from baking too flat.
That's all mixed in and I'll do the last bit of flour. You could put in even more flour
— that'd probably get you taller cookies, to a point. But you also gotta remember that
black and whites tend to dry a bit over the time it takes for the icing to set, and more
flour means drier baked goods. That looks good to me.
I'll give it a taste, the raw eggs being a minor health risk that I'm willing to take.
You do you. Since I used salted butter, I only want a tiny pinch more. If I'd used unsalted
butter I'd probably start with a half a teaspoon of the Morton kosher salt I use for most things.
That's done. The first of two baking sheets, parchment paper really helps when it comes
to peeling these off later, especially if you do big cookies. I'm scooping out like
half a cup of batter for each cookie.
The bakery I remember going to on Long Island made black and white cookies the size of dinner
plates, or at least that's how I recall them. I was proportionally much smaller at the time.
I'm spacing these really far apart, because they're gonna spread a ton. Drat, it looks
like I'm gonna get seven. I was shooting for eight. One is the only odd-number allowed
among baked goods!
I would guess pro bakers pipe out this batter to get perfect rounds. Unless I'm working
at a commercial scale I usually think piping bags take more effort than they're worth.
What I can do instead is wet my hands with water — that will allow me to shape these
into something more round without the batter sticking to me. I've seen people use the same
water film trick to handle super-sticky pizza doughs. It works real good.
It the oven at like 350ºF/180ºC convection bake. If you don't have a convection fan I'd
go a little hotter. In my oven, I'm guessing those will take about 20 minutes. In the meantime,
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Alright, here we are after like 18 minutes. Looking pretty good. You shouldn't expect
them to brown all the way on top. I'll pat this to feel if the inside is cooked. It's
still a little squishy. I'll give that a few more minutes.
Here we are after maybe 22. They should still look a little under-baked. If they're not,
they're gonna be dry by the time we actually eat them. Let those cool all the way down
and solidify before peeling them off the paper, which shouldn't be too hard. There, the bottoms
are the tops — the flat side is the one you ice. Speaking of which...
You'll need a big pile of powdered sugar. I would guess six cups — like 700g, at least.
It may seem like a lot, but it's good to have extra. You don't want to run out in the middle
of the job. Corn syrup — you don't have to use this, but just a little corn syrup
will make the icing shinier and softer. It's a different kind of sugar so it interferes
in crystallization. I'm just eyeballing a couple tablespoons. I want the icing pretty
firm when it's dried, but not shattering into shards when I bite through it.
Now it's time to stir in just enough water or milk to dissolve this into a glaze, and
it'll take way less than you think. I mean, what was that — a quarter cup, maybe? I'll
stir that up and yep, that was a little too much liquid. I want this very thick so I get
a nice thick layer of glaze on top of the cookie. A little more sugar to compensate.
If there are lumps, I wouldn't bother getting out a whisk. I'd just let this sit a few minutes
and then stir it again. Everything should dissolve. And you could put in a little bit
of vanilla, but there's plenty in the cake, and I want to keep the color bright. That
looks perfect — very thick, but still spreadable.
Again, I'm sure the bakeries would pipe this. If you have something a little wider than
a butter knife, that'd make this go a little faster, but anything will do. My approach
is to first drizzle the straight line down the middle, and then flood the rest of the
white half. Slap a lot of extra icing on. If there's too little to spread you'll risk
breaking up the surface of the cookie and getting crumbs mixed into the icing. Any excess
will just drip down off the side and we can break it off later.
The chocolate half will be much easier to apply it you let the first half set up nice
and firm, for maybe an hour. In the meantime, we can convert the remaining icing into chocolate.
I would guess three or four tablespoons of cocoa powder, but again, it's the kind of
thing you can just eyeball and then taste. I think dutched cocoa is traditional, both
for the flavor and for the darker color it provides, but natural would be fine.
You'll probably need a little extra liquid to get it all dissolved or dispersed. Some
people put in melted solid chocolate — very dark chocolate, or even unsweetened chocolate.
You can do that if you want a gooey texture to contrast the smooth, crisp texture of the
white icing. I just want the chocolate side a little gooier, so I'll add a little more
corn syrup to do that.
That tastes good to me, but it's not as dark in color as I want it. It's a black and white
cookie, not a brown and white. So, I will start stirring in a little blue food coloring.
Blue plus brown pigment should equal black. I don't want it literally black, but I do
want it very dark brown. There we go.
I'll just drizzle this down on the cookies with a spoon at first. Now that the white
icing is solid, it should form a solid flood bank, keeping that chocolate from spilling
over into the wrong side of the cookie. Again, just drizzle on the straight line, flood the
rest and then I'll switch to my knife to kinda pull it the rest of the way down the side.
Straight line drizzle, flood, pull. Straight line drizzle, flood, pull. It's a dance craze!
Now the hardest part — let that set overnight. I really don't think they taste right until
the next day. Sorry, honey.
"Can I eat one now?"
"No."
"Now?"
"No!"
"I want to eat one!"
So yeah, the next day you can just lift one up and kinda snap off any excess icing, or
if you want a little cleaner edge you can go around with a butter knife down on the
pan. We could have also let these drain on wire racks, but that would have made a big
mess. I think these are great — totally tastes like what I grew up eating on Long
Island when I visited by grandma. You can see the density of the crumb there.
The best part is the two-for-one tastes you get — you can have bites that are all chocolate,
all white, or different combinations of the two. Textbook heterogeneity. A classic for
a reason.