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Pinwheel Cookies
1½ t baking powder 1/2 C butter 1½ C sugar 1 egg yolk 3 T milk ½ C flour 1/8 t salt 1/2 t vanilla 1 square melted chocolate Cream butter, add sugar gradually, then the egg yolk and beat mixture well. Add milk, flour and baking powder, also salt; then vanilla. Divide dough into halves. To one ha dd 1 square melted chocolate. Roll white dough into thin rectangula. sheet; then roll the chocolate mixture into a sheet the same size. Place chocolate dough over the white and gently press together. Roll up as for jelly roll into a tight roll. Set in ice box for several hours to become firm. Cut into thin slices and lay, cut side down, on buttered cookie pan. Bake 8 to 10 minutes. Makes four dozen cookies. 1 C sugar 1 C chopped dates ¾ C flour 1 t baking powder
A standard icebox cookie: one dough, split and half of it darkened with chocolate, rolled together and sliced. The original gives no oven temperature, so the bake time alone will not get you there.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. Thin icebox slices of this type are usually baked hot enough to set in the 8 to 10 minutes given; something in the region of 375F is a reasonable starting point, and a cooler oven will need longer.
- Abbreviationst is teaspoon, T is tablespoon, C is cup. So 1½ teaspoons baking powder, 3 tablespoons milk, 1½ cups each sugar and flour.
- The chocolate squareOne square means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled slightly before it goes into half the dough. Sweetened chocolate chips are not a substitute here; the dough is already very sweet.
- Sugar-to-flour ratioEqual volumes of sugar and flour make an exceptionally soft, sweet dough that spreads. Read the quantities as printed, but expect a slack dough that must be handled cold; some cooks will want to work a little more flour into it.
- Rolling the two sheetsRoll each half between sheets of parchment or waxed paper rather than on a floured board. Chill both sheets until firm before stacking, then peel the paper off as you lay one on the other. Warm dough tears and the spiral goes muddy.
- ChillingSeveral hours in the refrigerator is the minimum; overnight is better, and the log can be frozen and sliced straight from the freezer. This is the hinge of the recipe, since a soft log squashes into ovals under the knife.
- SlicingThe recipe says only 'thin'. Use a thin sharp blade and rotate the log a quarter turn every few slices so one side does not flatten.
- PanA buttered pan is not needed with modern nonstick or parchment-lined sheets, and butter on the pan encourages the edges to spread and brown fast.
- YieldFour dozen, as stated.
Pinwheel cookies belong to the icebox-cookie family that spread through American community cookbooks from the 1920s onward, once mechanical refrigeration made a reliably cold shelf a normal part of the kitchen rather than a luxury. The technique solved a real problem for church-supper and bazaar baking: a chilled log could be made days ahead and sliced into dozens of uniform cookies on demand, with no cutter, no rerolling of scraps and no guesswork about size. The spiral itself is decorative rather than functional, and its appeal in a book like this one is obvious enough, since it produces a cookie that looks deliberate on a plate for the cost of one extra ounce of chocolate. Pinwheel, checkerboard and ribbon cookies are distinct patterns, each with its own way of arranging the dough before chilling.