Checkered Cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 ¼ cups confectioners sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ cup butter
• 3 egg yolks
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Directions:

1. In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, confectioners' sugar and baking powder.
2. Cut in the butter until the mixture has a mealy texture.
3. Stir in the egg yolks and vanilla until dough forms.
4. Divide dough into halves. Then, Knead the cocoa into one half.
5. Roll out each half of the dough into a rectangle, 8x10 inches. Slice each rectangle lengthwise into 8-1x10 inch strips.
6. Place two more on top of those, placing opposing colors on top of each other. Repeat until the checkerboard is four strips high.
7. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least fifteen minutes.
8. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets.
9. Unwrap dough and slice into 1/4 inch slices. Place slices 1 inch apart onto the prepared cookie sheets.
10. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven, until firm. Remove from baking sheets to cool on wire racks.

Preparation Method:

For my second home study I did it with Jenn, we did  checkered cookies. We used the creaming method. The checkered cookies was similar to the gingerbread cookies we did at school because we needed to mix all the dry and the dough was not really sticky so I needed to used my hand to mix all the ingredients together. It was hard to mix it because there was too many dry ingredients. The plain dough sticked together really well, but the chocolate dough was dry because we still put the cocoa it was hard to mix it because of the dryness. After 15 minutes of putting it in the fridge the moisture for the plain dough spread really good, while the chocolate dough was sort of breaking apart. All in all, we were able to cut it and made it to looked closer to checkered as we can.

Final Product:

Appearance: It was not checkered it turned out to be strips cookies. White dough was not over cooked, it has a light color like an eggshell color. While the chocolate part looked liked a normal chocolate cookies.

Taste: In the chocolate one you can taste the cocoa and both was not that sweet

Texture:It was dry and it was sort of crunchy after we were done baking it, but after 24 hours it was chewy.

Aroma: We were able to smell the flavor of cocoa powder

Experience:

After reading all the steps, procedure, and what you need to have to do this cookies. Make sure to watch a video of how to do it so you know what will the final product looked liked. We didn't watch the video the first time we did it and we shaped the dough wrong. We make it too flat and the original procedure it said put it in the fridge for an hour, but from the video it just said 15 minutes. I would say I would make this again because now I know what we did wrong. And I will make sure it shaped like checkered not strips.



Stephanie Esplana
Hour 5