Neapolitan Cookies

This recipe is a bit odd. Kind of an abomination, a chimera of disparate cookies and ice creams and fruits-made-powder. In Bravetart’s Snickerdoodle recipe, there is a variation for Cookies and Cream cookies. It demands that you skip the cinnamon sugar coating typical of a snickerdoodle, and fold in 8oz of frozen chopped Oreo cookies – preferably the Homemade Oreo Cookies contained in the same book – just before portioning the dough into cookie-sized balls and baking them.

The recipe is fucking good. A month or so previous to this discovery, I made a few batches of tri-flavor sugar cookies. They were pretty good, but nothing incredible. One of the trios that was popular - and that I also made - was neapolitan. Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. At some point I noticed that Bravetart's Oreo recipe also had a variation for strawberry filling, and I had the key ingredient for this variant sitting on my counter from my adventure into triple-flavored sugar cookies – powdered strawberries.

The snickerdoodle base is vanilla/butter. The Oreo cookies are chocolate. And if you can fill the cookies with strawberry, you'd have a way more interesting Neapolitan cookie with three completely different textures. There are a couple other variations I've made of this cookie. My current favorite is the Holidoodle, inspired by peppermint bark and my dislike of actual peppermint bits in baked good.

Ingredients

Strawberry Chunks

• 6 oz or 1.5 sticks Unsalted Butter
• 3/4 oz Freeze-Dried Strawberries
• 1/8 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
• 10 oz Organic Powdered Sugar

Neapolitan Cookies

• 10.5 oz All-Purpose Flour
• 4 oz or 1 stick Unsalted Butter — about 65ºF
• 3.5 oz Refined or Virgin Coconut Oil — about 70ºF
• 10.5 oz Granulated White Sugar
• 1 1/4 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
• 1 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/8 tsp freshly grated Nutmeg
• 1 tbsp Vanilla Extract
• 1 Large Egg
• 4 oz Oreo Cookies with the filling scraped out, or Nabisco Chocolate Wafers
• 2 oz Quality Dark Chocolate around 72%, chopped
• 6 oz Prepared Strawberry Chunks

Directions

Strawberry Chunks

1. In the bowl of a food processor, pulse the powdered sugar and freeze-dried strawberries until the strawberries have been pulverized to dust and the two powders are well blended.
2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium-low heat. Keep heating as the melted butter begins to bubble, and stir to keep the milk solids from sticking and burning on the bottom of the pan. Once the butter is totally quiet, remove it from the heat and pour it into the bowl of a stand mixer.
3. Add the powdered-strawberry-and-sugar mixture and salt to the butter. Mix on low speed for a moment so that the powdered sugar won't be flung out of the bowl, then increase to medium for 5-6 minutes. The paste should be light and smooth.
4. There are two options for creating the chunks themselves. You can quickly fill a piping bag, and pipe small dots on parchment paper to set into something akin to chocolate morsels. Alternatively you can spread the mix onto parchment and allow it to set, or even put it into a ziploc bag and let it set solid there. If you opt for creating a slab, roughly chop the solidified strawberry slab into chunks before adding it to the cookie dough.

Neapolitan Cookies

1. Roughly chop your chosen chocolate wafers, then freeze for 2 hours until hard.
2. Adjust the oven rack to the middle position, and preheat the oven to 350ºF. Line an aluminum baking sheet with parchment paper.
3. Combine the butter, coconut oil, sugar, salt, baking powder, vanilla, and nutmeg in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Moisten the mix on low speed, then crank it up to medium speed until light and fluffy. This usually takes around 5 minutes, but the consistency is a much more important indicator. If it isn't light and fluffy yet, keep it going. It'll get there. Scrape down the beater and bowl once or twice while you're creaming to make sure everything is evenly aerated.
4. Crack the egg into the mixer, and keep beating until smooth. Scrape down the bowl and beater again. Continue mixing until smooth again, then reduce speed to low and add the flour to the bowl. Mix until it forms a homogenous dough. You can do this by hand if you like, to avoid over-mixing and tough cookies.
5. With a flexible spatula fold the frozen oreos, strawberry chunks, and chopped chocolate into the dough so that they're evenly distributed. If you're lazy like I am, maybe you'll skip all the chopping and just throw whole oreo cookies and a slab of strawberry goodness into the mixer and let the paddle attachment beat them to pieces. This is a bad idea. Don't do it. It is bad for your mixer bowl. It is bad for your mixer's motor. The chunks will be both too small and too large all at the same time. It is a cookietastrophe waiting to happen. Don't be me.
6. Scoop into either 2.5 oz portions for large cookies or 1.25 oz for small cookies, and arrange on the parchment-lined baking sheet with 2.5" between each. Flatten each portion into 1/2" thick discs. Bake at 350ºF until firm and visibly dry around the edges, but still puffy and lifted in the middle. This takes around 15 minutes for the large cookies and 8 for the small. This varies, and you should start checking them at 10 minutes or 6 minutes respectively. The flecks of chocolate cookie in the dough will make this dough look a bit more grey than your typical cookie dough, but the center of the cookies shouldn't brown at all in the oven.
7. Remove the cookies from the oven and allow them to cool on the baking sheet for at least 10 minutes until they're set and hold their shape. You can eat them warm, throw them into an airtight container for 2-3 days, or freeze them in an airtight container for at least 2-3 months.