Ebony and Ivory (aka Black and White cookies)

Ebony and ivory/live together in perfect harmony/side by side on my piano...


I asked my husband to pick his Top 3 cookie recipes from Martha's Baking Handbook, and he immediately chose the Black and White Cookie. He grudgingly found two other possibilities, but he was practically giddy with excitement over these cookies, so I decided to be nice and make them for him.


My only knowledge of Black and White Cookies comes from the infamous Seinfeld episode where Jerry and the gang visit a bakery to buy a hostess gift for a party they are attending. Elaine almost kills a woman over a chocolate babka, and Jerry finds comfort in a Black and White Cookie (which, ironically, eventually makes him sick). Hopefully these cookies will have better karma than Jerry's.


I started by making the cookie dough. I whisked together the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt) in a large bowl.


Next, I creamed the butter and sugar together, using my stand mixer.

Nice and fluffy!

I added the eggs, one at a time, and then the vanilla extract. I blended them until they were well-incorporated and the batter was creamy.

Finally, I added the flour mixture and some heavy cream. You know a recipe is going to be good when it involves heavy cream.

The batter tasted okay (yes, I always taste my batter... don't you?) It tasted like typical sugar cookie dough. I'd never tried Black and White cookies before, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

Per Martha's instructions, I formed the dough into small balls and placed them on cookie sheets to bake in the oven.

After my first batch, I realized the cookies didn't flatten very much during baking, so I needed to form the dough into a disk-like shape before baking them. Unfortunately, I didn't take another photo of them after I started doing this, but I basically just flattened out the balls of dough I made the first time.

Per Martha's instructions, I took them out of the oven when the edges were ever-so-slightly browned. My husband supported these instructions, because he said the cookies were supposed to be cake-like.

My dog REALLY wanted a cookie. (She also desperately needed a hair cut. She could have claimed the title of The Shaggy Dog when this photo was taken. Don't worry, she's gotten a hair cut since then.)

After I baked the cookies, I realized that they didn't look as perfectly round as the ones in Martha's photos, and I knew I should have used a cookie cutter (this isn't part of her recipe). So I decided to improvise, and I decided to make slightly more perfectly round cookies by cutting my cookies with a round biscuit cutter. You can also see a photo of Martha's cookies in the background of this photo.

At this point, I ate some of the cookie scraps (it was my duty to test them), and I was slightly underwhelmed. They tasted like plain sugar cookies, and I'm not a huge fan of plain sugar cookies. I wasn't sure if this project was going to be worth it in the end, but I forged ahead. My husband, on the other hand, thought the cookies tasted perfect at this stage.

While the cookies were cooling, it was time to make the icing. The icing was very simple - just heavy cream and powdered sugar for the white icing, and then you add dutch-process cocoa powder to make the chocolate icing.

First, I sifted the powdered sugar into a large bowl. This frosting used a lot of powdered sugar. Like a whole box worth. There was powdered sugar all over the place by the time I finished this!

I whisked the heavy cream into the sugar until it was smooth. This frosting was VERY sweet.

I poured half of the white icing into a second bowl, so I could turn it into chocolate. I added a healthy amount of cocoa powder, and voila - chocolate frosting! This was DELISH, by the way. I had a little extra, and I'm saving it for some other purpose. Like maybe eating it with a spoon.

Side note: I had to use some cookie scraps to make an Obama cookie. Mmm edible politics.

Where was I? Oh yes, icing. I started with the white icing. I used an offset spatula to frost the cookies. I folded a piece of parchment paper in half, so it had a straight edge on one side, and I flattened it over half of the cookie, in an attempt to try to form a relatively straight line in the middle of the cookies. Then I frosted the side that wasn't covered by parchment paper. They aren't perfect, but I think I did a pretty good job.

You may notice that one of the cookies in this photo is completely covered in white icing. There was another cookie that fell into the bowl of chocolate icing, so it was completely covered in dark brown frosting. I called it The Augustus Gloop Cookie.

After the white icing had dried, I frosted the other side with chocolate.

I think they turned out pretty darn well, if I do say so myself. They were a pain to make, but they look pretty good. And now I'm a Black and White cookie convert. They are delicious! The icing definitely adds a lot to the cookie, especially on the chocolate side. I could eat a dozen of these with no problem.