Black and White Cookies

Every time I travel to NYC, I always have to run to grab one of their famous black and white cookies. I enjoy them so much, my girlfriend who lives in NYC always brings me one or two when she comes to visit me. Occasionally I see these sold elsewhere around the country, but they are never the same delicious cookies. In case you don't know, these are more like a fluffy cake with delicious frosting on top. Because I have always loved these cookies I thought I should give it a try and just make them myself. 

The various ingredients needed for the cookies. The recipe is listed on the bottom of the post. 

The recipe is made in 3 distant stages: the cookie, the white frosting, and the black frosting. The cookie must be made first.

Preheat oven to 400F. Lightly grease or line with parchment paper 2 baking sheets. Beat together butter, sugar, salt, baking powder, lemon and vanilla until well combined.

Beat in eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. I beat each egg for 30 seconds to keep the mixture well mixed. This photo is after one egg added.

A picture showing the final egg being added. I stopped the mixture in between the egg additions.

The mixture now has all the eggs added in it and is slowly looking more and more like a nice batter.

Next, stir in flour alternately with milk. I added one cup of flour then 1/4 cup of milk and repeated until the required amounts of each were added. Adding it like this is supposed to keep it fluffy. Mix gentlyas there is no need to beat the mixture at this stage.

Once completely the mixture should look like this all fluffy and battery.

Another picture of the finished batter.

Move the bowl to the previously prepared baking sheets.

I used a 1/4 cup measuring to make even cookies on the baking sheet. I placed just 6 to a sheet to make sure none of them touch each other or the edges of the sheet.

Here are the 6 cookies on the baking. I used the bottom of the scoop, wet with water, to press the cookies to around 3" wide. If you do not wet the bottom of whatever flat surface you use to press the cookies it will stick badly. I re-wet the bottom of the scoop after each one.

This is what the cookies looks like after being pressed. As you can see the shape is quite rough.

To smooth the edges of the cookie as shown below I used a plastic spatula which is wet to smooth the edge.  I think this will make the cookie much more uniform when baking is complete. 

Bake cookies for 10-12 minutes at 400 F.

The cookies should have a light brown bottom or even lighter as long as they are cooked all the way through.

Here are the cooling cookies. I had to bake in 2 batches in the oven. The cookies on the left are already pretty much cooled which is why they are stacked up to make space for the freshly cooled ones.

Now that the cookies are cooling the frosting need to be made. First the white frosting is made so that the bowl doesn't need to be cleaned before making the black frosting. The white frosting is made by whisking together confectioners' sugar, corn syrup, vanilla and hot water.

The mixture when it is done mixing.

This is the consistency after mixing. Be sure not to over mix as it will make the mixture too thick.

Next the frosting is spread on to one half of each cookie as shown below. The frosting will have time to set when the black frosting is being made.

Now off to make the black frosting. Combine confectioners' sugar, corn syrup, vanilla and hot water. Stir until smooth.

Add in melted chocolate. I used a microwave to melt chocolate chips as this was easier than using low heat over the oven. Mix together to a smooth icing.

Here is the finalized consistency. I don't believe the wire whisk was necessary though.

Place the black frosting on the other half of each cookie. They should not look finished. Once cooled and the frosting has set they can be moved easily and placed in plastic ziplock bags.

Just another finished cookie. These just look so nice. Yum.

Recipe

Cookies
1 cup butter, unsalted
1.5 cups granulated sugar
1.5 teaspoons of salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon of lemon oil (I used lemon juice just more of it because I forgot to but lemon oil.)
2 teaspoons of vanilla
3 large eggs
4.5 cups of all-purpose flour
1 cup of milk

White Icing
3 and 1/3 cups of confectioners' sugar
3 tablespoons of light corn syrup
3 tablespoons of hot water
0.75 teaspoons of vanilla extract

Black Icing

2 and 2/3 cups of confectioners' sugar
3 tablespoons of light corn syrup
1/4 cup of hot water
0.75 teaspoons of vanilla extract
0.75 cup of semisweet chocolate