Neapolitan cookies (times two)
There’s something nostalgic about Neapolitan ice cream. I remember my dad opening up and unfolding the rectangular cartons of the chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream and cutting big slices that consisted of equal portions of each flavor. Neapolitan actually refers to belonging to, or characteristic of Naples, Italy. The associated tri-color may have originally included pistachio (instead of chocolate) to represent the colors of the Italian flag. To this day, there seems to be a debate on the correct order of flavors and the correct order to eat the flavors! When we lived in Arizona, my nanny would buy Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches for the kids. They would methodically eat one flavor at a time. White or vanilla was winter; chocolate or brown was fall; and strawberry or pink was summer. Kids’ imaginations are great. I guess we didn’t have spring in Arizona—winter went straight to summer apparently in their minds! Regardless of which order you prefer the three flavors to appear in your Neapolitan treats, to me, it’s more about the nostalgia than the actual taste. When I saw Neapolitan Cookies #70 in Sarah Kieffer’s 100 Cookies book, I knew I had to make them.
Neapolitan cookies recreate the traditional ice cream into a cookie. They are simply sugar cookies made up of three flavors of dough. The 100 Cookies recipe was inspired by the Neapolitan cookie from Matthew Rice, founder of Pink Door Cookies in Nashville. Interestingly, he uses Strawberry Nesquik powder to get the vibrant pink color in his Neapolitan Cookies. To make the cookies, you prepare the sugar cookie dough and divide it into three portions. Set aside the plain which will be the vanilla. Add one ball back to your mixer. Measure a ½ cup freeze-dried strawberries and using a food processor, pulverize them into a powder. I buy the Simple Truth Freeze-Dried Strawberries at my local Kroger store. I used four drops of red food coloring per Sarah’s recommendation. Mix thoroughly and then wipe out your mixer bowl and add in the third section of dough. For the chocolate dough, use a good quality Dutch processing cocoa powder. Or, if you want a more intense dark chocolate color, use black cocoa powder. I used The Cocoa Trader Dutch Processed Black Cocoa Powder, which gives you an Oreo-colored (and tasting) dough. Note: Don’t wear your white sweatshirt when mixing the strawberry dust and handling the black cocoa powder.
Some tips
High-quality ingredients:
Good cookies depend on good ingredients. The quality of butter, vanilla and cocoa powder you use are important. An extra egg yolk (I prefer to use pasture-raised eggs) adds chewiness.
Handy equipment:
Kitchen scale – Buy one! It comes in handy for more things than you’d think.
Stand mixer – While you can use a hand mixer, a stand mixer makes life in the kitchen easier and enables you to whip up desserts more rapidly.
Food processor – If you don’t want to invest in a full-size food processor, there are a number of small or mini-sized food processors on the market that you can start with. Often I find that I don’t want to dirty my big food processor for a tiny job and turn instead to the mini-Cuisinart that my husband gave me 30+ years ago.
Once you have the three flavors of dough prepared, you’re ready to roll the balls. Start with one flavor and pinch off about a ½ ounce of dough so you end up with three equally numbered piles of balls. This is the “hardest” part about these cookies – rolling the balls.
You can eyeball the amounts, but I found it easy to pinch off the dough and drop it onto my kitchen scale to ensure they were mostly uniform. I’m not sure how she got 15 cookies by pinching off a half-ounce portions. I ended up with 23 and they were still large (about 4” diameter) cookies. So don’t fret too much about the size, just try to get them equal.
When you have all the balls rolled, press one of each color together. My intuition was to arrange in thirds, resembling a beach ball. But then I realized that the Sarah Kieffer ones were arranged side-by-side like the ice cream, so that’s how I rolled the remainder. Either way works! It depends on what camp you’re in. Do you want to taste all three flavors in one bite or do you intend to carefully eat one flavor at a time?
Bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, rotating your pans halfway through. Let cool up to 10 minutes on the cookie sheets and transfer to wire racks to finish cooling.
Of course, I had to eat one before it was cooled. And then I took the Neapolitan nostalgia a step further. I decided to assembly a few ice-cream sandwiches.
I scooped out vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream into a skinny rectangle about an inch thick and then used a round cutter to cut a circle that matched the size of my cookie, making sure to match the order of the ice cream flavors with the way the appeared in my cookies. The verdict: even better than the cookies by themselves! The cookies stayed soft enough and were easy to eat. I prefer the natural strawberry ice creams (Häagen-Dazs, Tillamook, Breyer’s). If you want a pinker color, then use an ice cream with added coloring. I sprinkled a little freeze-dried strawberry dust on the edges. If you make a lot of these, you’ll need to work fast to avoid the ice cream melting.
If Neapolitan desserts bring back childhood memories for you, here are a couple more recipes:
Sugar Wafer Neapolitan Ice Cream Cake
Of course, you could just go to the store and pick up a carton of Breyer’s Neapolitan Ice Cream (chocolate is in the middle) or Good Humor Giant Neapolitan Ice Cream Sandwiches (vanilla is in the middle). The Kroger variety puts vanilla in the middle too. I also went looking for the cream-filled sugar wafer cookies that I remember from my childhood. When I looked in the store and online, it appears that you can purchase the cookies in a single flavor, but difficult to find a package of all three flavors together like I could swear they used to be sold. This Keebler variety pack was the closest I could find!
Let me know where your trip down Neapolitan nostalgia lane takes you. And will you eat the chocolate, vanilla or strawberry first?