Neapolitan Checkerboard Cookies

This cookie is a real labour of love, with emphasis on the labour. Three different doughs, lots of measuring and cutting and assembling, and slicing. But, it made for a fabulous presentation and the flavours are distinct.

The recipe is from this year’s NYT Cookie Week. It’s meant to evoke Neapolitan ice cream in its flavouring: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate,

The one special ingredient you need is freeze dried strawberries. Most of the time, we buy the snack packets from our local Dollarama. You make the doughs in a particular order, so you don’t need to wash your mixing bowl between doughs. Do pay attention to the quantities needed in each recipe. I reduced the sugar slightly in my strawberry dough, because mine were sweetened already.

We stopped buying plastic wrap (clingfilm, Sarah Wrap, etc.) so I wrapped my doughs in leftover produce and bread bags that we save. Once they were cold enough, I had my daughter get out a ruler and rolling pin, and start to make the strips. Getting an even rectangle was probably the hardest part. After that, slicing the plank into nine, half-inch strips was easy.

The assembly was a lot of fun, as was smushing all of them together to form the pattern. Due to time constraints, the logs only chilled for about 6 hours, but we baked off two logs anyway so we could bring them to a party.

Keep an eye on the vanilla parts of the cookies, they’ll tell you when they’re baked enough. If you leave them in the oven too long, they’ll brown too much and then you’ll lose the colour contrast.

We loved that these were so pretty to look at, and that you could taste each flavour in those little tiny squares.