Black and White Cookies

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

2. Make cookies: Mix together flour, salt, and baking powder in a medium bowl until well combined and set aside. Beat together sugar and butter in a large bowl using an electric mixer until creamy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs and beat for 30 seconds more. Add lemon zest, vanilla, and lemon extract; mix well. Add flour mixture and milk gradually in equal 1/3 proportions, mixing well after each addition until fully incorporated.

3. Spoon cookie dough into 1/4-cup portions onto the prepared cookie sheet.

4. Bake in the preheated oven until edges just begin to turn golden brown, 13 to 15 minutes. Transfer cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

5. While cookies cool, make vanilla icing: Melt butter in a double boiler over medium heat. Stir in confectioners' sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, and salt. Add water gradually until icing comes together. Heat over a double boiler until icing falls off the back of a spoon in thick ribbons, 2 to 4 minutes. Set heat to low.

6. Frost 1/2 of the golden brown underside of each cooled cookie with vanilla icing using a rubber spatula. Allow excess to dribble back into the double boiler. Let cookies cool for 10 minutes.

7. Meanwhile, making chocolate icing: Set the double boiler back to medium heat and add confectioners' sugar, semisweet chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, corn syrup, butter, vanilla, and food coloring to remaining vanilla icing. Mix well, adding water until icing is combined. Heat until icing falls off of the back of a spoon in thick ribbons, 2 to 4 minutes. Set heat to low.

8. Frost the other 1/2 of the cooled cookies using a rubber spatula in the same manner as before. Let cookies cool until icing sets, 1 to 2 hours.

Cook's Notes:

If using salted butter, omit the 3/4 teaspoon of salt in the recipe.

To make it easier and less messy to get round cookies, pour batter into a pastry bag and pipe out the 1/4-cup sized portions directly onto the baking sheet.

Add the optional food coloring if you want the chocolate icing on the cookies to be black instead of dark brown.

To avoid making any wasted icing, for the chocolate fondant icing, only add 2 ounces of semisweet and 2 ounces of bittersweet chocolate directly to the vanilla fondant icing and nothing else. The chocolate icing will become harder to spread though as the icing begins to run out. Adding the additional butter, sugar, corn syrup and vanilla extract as mentioned in the recipe will ensure you have more than enough icing for the cookies.