November 15, 2008

Black and White Cookies! (Obama cookies...lol)




So I was craving Black and White cookies for God knows why because I have only had them like once or twice...but anyway I definitely recommend you try to make these because they were way easier than I expected. First I searched for a bunch of recipes to see what was out there that sounded good and to just compare everything. I did find a good recipe on Smitten Kitchen but I still chose to do it my way. I decided to use a boxed white cake mix and then fudge with it from there. I chose to do this because originally delis used up their left over cake batter by adding extra flour and making these cookies. So I made the boxed mix and slowly added flour until it was thick enough to retain its shape when placed on a cookie sheet but far from being as thick as regular cookie batter (remember these are really supposed to be more like cake texture than cookie texture). The only other thing I added to the batter after the flour was lemon extract. I doled them out on a cookie sheet covered with wax paper and used an ice-cream scoop and flattened them a bit with the back of it. Now be careful because these bake up pretty fast...about 8 minutes in a 400 degree oven was all they needed to be perfectly golden on the bottom but still white on top. On to the icing, this was one place where many recipes differed but most seemed to use a simple powdered sugar, corn syrup and water icing, where the corn syrup and water are boiled together in the microwave. So I just made the white icing a good spreading consistency and spread that on with a butter knife. And for the "black" icing I added melted butter and semisweet chocolate (which i made in a double boiler) and mixed it in with the white icing. They really turned out well, my little brother praised me for them every time he took one from the plate. The one sad thing about these cookies is that they really are only good 1 day and maybe the day after you bake them and only if you keep them very tightly packaged. So if you plan on making these cookies keep that in mind.