Field Trip 101...as Simple as Black and White

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Field Trips and Special Guests, in which I bake with a friend and solve the world's problems.  (All in a day's blog.)

City chick: Alfonso

Perhaps with the exception of Alfonso, an incredibly sophisticated Barred Rock chicken, few things in life are black and white.  Everywhere we turn, we are faced with partisanship.  City or country?  Republican or Democrat?  Chocolate or Vanilla?  What's more, I learned this week that partisanship actually makes you stupid. (Thanks for the heads up, Michael Buckley.)  Suddenly this conundrum was keeping me up at night, so I decided to get professional help to put things in perspective.  I went straight to Lori--she's one of my dearest friends AND a psychologist.  (A two-fer!) 

Meet Lori!  She's the best.

Lori was happy to help me through my crisis, and just like that, I'm sitting at her kitchen table solving the world's problems (you're welcome). 

Ohhhh...that's a professional Kitchen Aid MixMaster.

Sure, Lori's PhD means she's great in a crisis, but what really counts is that she's a baker par excellence. (She's even had her own baking business.)  Somehow we would bake our way out of this conundrum together.  Like any good therapist baker, she sat me down, and we attacked the problem by consulting the DSM-V of baking:  Baking Illustrated.  

The well-loved keeper of all things sweet.

The key to answering the partisan problems began on page 448:  Black and White Cookies.

The best thing about Baking Illustrated? The helpful hints! (NO lemon flavor! What were you thinking?!)

There are those (Jerry Seinfeld) who take one look at the Black and White cookie and think of racial harmony.  Or yin and yang.  If you are from New York City, you instantly recognize the Black and White at the city's signature cookie.  But not everyone concurs.  Note that if you go to Boston, it's known as the "Half Moon." (Thanks, Red Sox Nation.)  But I am troubled.  How can it represent all that is right if the chocolate and vanilla are separate?  How can it be the cookie of harmony if we can't even agree on its name?  Again with the partisanship.  Undaunted, Lori and I persevered.  First, the cookie ingredients:

The Cookie

Ah, King Arthur Flour, my love.  My one and only.

4 cups (16 oz.) plain cake four

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened but still cool

1 ¾  cups (12 ¼ oz.) granulated sugar

2 large eggs at room temperature

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon lemon extract

1 cup milk

This is a serious recipe.  When a recipe gives measurements in more than one way (cups and ounces!) and gives lengthy descriptions of butter and egg temperatures, you are in the presence of greatness.  It also means you better pay attention to the details:

This is what room temperature organic eggs and butter look like. Wait!  They look just like regular eggs and butter.  (The kettle is on for tea.)

Lori has incredibly high standards, which is why eating at her house is sublime and baking with her makes me feel slightly lazy.  Everything she uses (from equipment to ingredients) is top notch--that's what being a pro will do to you.  It's awesome.  But it's also awesome to be the schleppy home baker (me) who is perfectly happy baking up a batch with whatever is in the cupboard.  Mix and match, my cookie-loving friends.  Whatever gets you to the cookie.  

These little pockets of wonderfulness are going to bake at 375 degrees, so Lori gets the oven going and moves the racks to the lower and upper middle of her oven. Folks, do yourself a favor:  know your oven.  Know how it heats (Evenly?  I doubt it.).  Know how they run (20 degrees hot or cold)?  With baking, it matters.  And for the love of god, buy some parchment paper.  Life's too short to wash cookie sheets.

I watch, mesmerized, as Lori gets to work.  Yeah, yeah, I know how to bake, but Lori's a pro.  She combines the dry stuff and sets it aside (boring), but then she gets to work creaming the butter and adding the sugar.  She sets her awesome MixMaster to work, and we realize we have a few minutes to wait while the butter and sugar get fluffier and fluffier.  The perfect time to visit Lori's chickens!  A few steps out the door, and here we are chatting with the ladies:

I like to call them the Kitchen Chickens--it's just fun to say.

Here's Alfonso (again)...of course the black & white chicken is Lori's! 

The butter and sugar are ready when they look like this:

It takes time to get this kind of fluff...be patient!

Now it's time to add the eggs, vanilla and lemon extract.  Make sure you scrape down the sides and the bottom so that it is all mixed very well.  The mixer won't just do it all for you.  If the butter isn't mixed evenly, the cookies will not bake evenly.  Period.  Set the mixer on low and add a little of the flour mixture.  Then the milk.  Then the flour.  Then the milk. Then the flour. Then the milk. Then the flour.  (You should be done now.)  

She's a pro, but you can and should attempt this at home.

Now comes the tricky part.  These cookies, as Lori pointed out, are really little cupcake tops.  This means that you need to treat them accordingly.  You're baking a cake.  (And here you thought it was just a blog about cookies--try to stay with me, because we're way outside the box today.)  To follow proper cake protocol, you must taste the batter to make sure it is good.  (YES, you must!)

YUM!  Raw eggs are GOOD!

To get the cookies onto the cookie sheets (which you have lined with parchment already, right?) you will need a 1/4 cup measure and a spoon (like I have) or one of these nifty measuring cup scoopers (like Lori has):

Scoop out 1/4 cup balls of dough onto the parchment paper and place them 2 inches apart, like this:  

Next, wet your index and middle fingers with a little water and then gently pat the cookies down, like this, until they are about 2 1/2 inches wide:

So shiny!

Bake these little pat-a-cakes for 20 minutes, rotating the pans in the oven after 10 minutes.  They are done when they are light golden brown on the edges.  

Beauties!

After baking, let them cool for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.  "OH NO!" you say, "My cookies turned out like THIS:"

Perfectly imperfect

Lori, veteran of many batches of Black and Whites, says the edges get all smushy like this when you don't scrape down the edges of the bowl and stir them back in enough when doling out the dough.  The good news is, you can just trim them up with a knife and make them look as round as the moon.  They'll be iced, so no one (but you) will know!

Now...The Icing!  This is where the Black and Whites come into being. 

Icing

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1/3 cup water

5 cups (20 oz.) confectioners' sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate (either in the microwave or on the stove over water; either is perfectly fine with me) and set it aside.  In a separate pan, bring the corn syrup and water to a boil and then remove the pan from the stove.  Immediately pour in the confectioner's sugar and vanilla into the corn syrup mixture and stir until combined.  Transfer 3/4 of the vanilla mixture into the melted chocolate and stir until combined.  (Yes, you heard it here first:  vanilla and chocolate are combined!  SEE, it's NOT simply black and white! The revolution--or is it revelation?--begins.)

From here, you set to work icing.  The first big decision:  do you start with the vanilla or the chocolate?  We divided and conquered.  Lori took vanilla, and I took chocolate.  Or was it the other way around?

Look closely...what do you see?

Now it's Lori's turn to be dismayed--the chocolate has gone matte.  She likes her icing nice and shiny.  (See photo above for examples of both.)  The problem?  The chocolate icing cooled too much.  The solution?  Either reheat it ever-so-slightly or add a few drops--drops!--of hot water.  As soon as the chocolate looks glossy again, you are ready to go.  Same thing with the vanilla.  Of course, some of us don't care if our icing is glossy or matte (those are lipstick terms as far as I am concerned), but for those of you who do care, you now know what to do.

So we're working, working, working, and it's entirely possible I was licking my fingers and icing cookies at the same time, but this batch was for us, so I didn't care.  I was throwing caution into the wind.  The next thing I knew, I was questioning the whole notion of Black and Whites.  Why I asked Lori are the chocolate and vanilla kept separate?  The separation is a false choice.  They taste the same when mixed together.  My chef pal, Patty, recently pointed out "No one really messes with Black and Whites." But I am a Native Texan.  I mess.  I looked at Lori and said Let's go crazy.  Let's blur some lines.  Mix ALL the chocolate and vanilla together!  And we did, ladies and gentlemen, we did. (Actually, Lori did.)

Blurred lines.

First, we were cautious.  We made a few brown and whites.  Then, we felt brave and went for the full brown:

Look at those bad boys.

And you know what?  They were delicious.  All of the them.  The traditional Black and Whites, the Brown and Whites and the Browns.  By the time we sat down and had a few, I was feeling much better.  Thanks to Lori, I had a made it through my crisis of partisan stupidity.  Black and White?  Maybe--if I feel like it.  But really, I like Brown, and I think the world would be a better place if more people did, too.