Whether it be a checked racing flag or an 8x8 game board, a checkerboard pattern is familiar and fun. Join me today as we bake this alternating pattern into delicious vanilla and chocolate checkered shortbread cookies. Here I have all the ingredients measured out for the two different doughs. For the vanilla dough I have flour, butter, sugar, a little bit of vanilla and an egg yolk. For the chocolate dough, I have flour and in the flour I also have coco, which makes the chocolate dough chocolate, butter, sugar a little bit of vanilla and this time a whole egg instead of just an egg yolk, because the coco added to the dry ingredients makes for a stiffer dough, so you want the extra liquid that you get from whole egg.
I am going to take my softened butter and my granulated sugar and mix them until they are ready. I am going to add my wet ingredients, my wet ingredients, my liquid ingredients, egg yolk and the vanilla and to this mixture, I am going to add my dry ingredients which again we are making the chocolate. So, I have the flour and coco in here. We are getting a little bit of a flour storm. Sprinkle a little flour on my bench; get my dough out of the bowl, oh! Messy-messy, that's okay, it's all going to come together. Now, I have my nice little rectangle, I wrap it in some plastic wrap.
Now I am going to make the vanilla dough and in my bowl, I have sugar and the butter and I am going to cream them for about five minutes until they are light and fluffy. To the cream, butter and sugar, I am going to add vanilla and the egg yolk, I am going to add the dry ingredients and make the dough. The vanilla and the chocolate dough have now been chilled and I am going to roll them out into rectangular sheets, you will see I am going to sprinkle flour on my surface and on my rolling pan to make sure that the dough doesn't stick. The rectangular sheets of dough have been chilled and now I am going to cut them and layer them, you are going to see how the checkerboard pattern actually gets formed.
So, I take the first layer and I am going to paint it with egg white and this egg white acts as the glue. So, there we go, now I take my other layer, put it right on top, give it a little press. This now needs to be cut in half and stacked again. What do they always say? Measure twice, cut once. Now in continuing to build the checkerboard pattern, I am going to layer the two pieces that I just cut. At first I have to use my glue, my egg white, paint the top and put the second half, the other two alternating layers right on top and then I am going to cut slices from this alternating block of dough, stack those and then you will see how the checkerboard pattern gets formed. Once again, I have put the dough in the fridge to make sure it's nice and cold and also to give that egg white a chance to stick to the layers.
So I am going to measure across and you can make them as large as you like, but the key is that you need to be consistent. So I am going to make these a quarter of an inch and I am going to score it, so that when I go to slice it, I'm right on target. Now with my very sharp knife, I am going to cut my stripes. Now I have my alternating stripes of dough, chocolate, vanilla and chocolate, vanilla and I am going to stack them and glue them in order to make the checkerboard pattern. So I have my first sheet, I am going to paint it with our egg white glue and take another shade and an important thing to get the pattern to start is you have an alternating color stripe. So here we have chocolate-vanilla-chocolate, so now I have to have vanilla-chocolate-vanilla, giving a little press.
Paint the stripe and just put it on top, simple enough. So I have taken the checkerboard logs and I wrapped them in plastic and chilled them in the fridge. Now at this point you can stick them in the freezer and use them whenever you like. Just the idea, now we're all made and we are going to have our own version of Pillsbury slice of big cookies, taste a lot better though. I'm going to unwrap one at the logs and I am going to slice. Now we will bake these cookies for about 12 minutes or so in the 350 oven, you don't want to over bake them they are not suppose have any color they are really a traditional shortbread cookie, you will know they are done when surface has sort of a dull finish. Here we have our Checkered Shortbread cookies, perfect. Thank you so much for joining me; hope to see you again soon.
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