Mini Black and White Cookies

I love to bake cookies.  They could very possibly be my favorite thing ever to bake.  There are just so many variations, so many possibilities, so much room to be creative.  And lately in my cookie baking I've been interested in more off-the-beaten-path combinations and ingredients.  Snickers cookies, oreo stuffed brownies, pumpkin pecan oatmeal cookies, peanut butter nutella....at any given moment if I'm wearing a spaced out look, chances are very good that I'm daydreaming about what weirdo cookie I'm going to make next.  And call me a snob, but usually just a vanilla chocolate combo isn't enough to inspire me.  I was so, so wrong.

Let these little babies be a testament to triumphant simplicity.

Perhaps you recall my recent love affair with black and white cookies.  I love everything about them.  The huge, buttermilky, cakey pillows of joy covered half in the most perfect vanilla glaze and half in delicious semi sweet chocolate.  Is there even one thing about them that doesn't make your mouth water just thinking about it?

And of course, the gigantic size of the traditional black and white cookies is part of what makes them perfect.  However, it turns out that the mini versions are equally as perfect, with less than half the guilt!  I'm not exactly sure how the math works out on that one, but rest assured, it does.

Once again, I have to give the nod to Martha Stewart on this one, this is her only very gently modified recipe.

Mini Black and White Cookies
(adapted from Martha Stewart)


Ingredients


Cookies


1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp coarse salt
6 Tbsp butter, softened
1/2 c sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla 
1/3 cup low fat buttermilk, shaken


Icing


2 cups powdered sugar
1 Tbsp and 1 tsp light corn syrup
2 1/2 tsp lemon juice
1/4 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp water, more as needed
1 Tbsp dutch-process cocoa powder


Sift flour, baking soda, and salt.  Mix butter until creamy.  Add sugar, mix until fluffy.  Mix in egg and vanilla.  Add flour in three batches, alternating with buttermilk, using electric mixer.  Drop tablespoons of dough onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.


Bake at 350 for about 11 minutes, let cool completely on cookie sheet.  


Once cookies have cooled completely, whisk icing ingredients EXCEPT COCOA together and spread onto half of the cookies (bottoms).  Add cocoa to remaining icing and more water if needed, ice other half of cookies.  Allow icing to set completely.