Neapolitan Checkerboard Cookies Recipe (2024)

I added about a teaspoon of cream to the strawberry and chocolate doughs, just to help them come together. The cookies worked beautifully and they taste amazing.

I made these with pistachios instead of the freeze dried strawberries. I weighed out 68 grams of shelled pistachios and ground them up in my food processor before adding them to the dough. I made the other two doughs the same as in the recipe They turned out great, good combo if you like pistachios.

I have seen freeze dried strawberries at Trader Joe's if you have one nearby.

I just made the three flavors of dough and put the rectangles in the fridge. In the video she says you need to hydrate the dough and she suggests 24 hours (or at least assembling in the evening if making the dough in the morning.) The written recipe doesn't mention this at all! So glad I watched the video and caught this instruction (also because Sue is awesome and the video is fun.)

Is there a reason not to make all the basic dough in one batch, divide it in three and then add the flavorings? Or at least measure the initial dry and then wet ingredients together, and divide each into three, to reduce duplication of steps? Thanks for any thoughts.

The dough looks like dry pebbles when you heap it on the plastic wrap, but when you roll it with a rolling pin in its plastic wrap package, it comes together into a slab. Give it a try!

I made the cookies. They turned out well. Yes the dough was dry, but when you compress it inside the plastic wrap, it comes together nicely. I would recommend cutting and assembling the strips when the dough is warmer, not fully chilled, so that it is flexible rather than crumbly. Yum!

Just a heads up- there is a silicone packet in the freeze dried strawberries packages. Don’t dump your strawberries in the blender without removing it first! -which I did once making macaron filling -arrrrgh!!

I made a 10x 5 inch painter’s tape lines on my kitchen counter so when I dumped out the doughs on the plastic wrap I could see the dimensions to roll it out to. And agreed that though the chocolate and strawberry doughs in particular come out pretty crumbly, using the plastic wrap they come together nicely.

In the video, she says to put the plastic wrapped dough slabs in the refrigerator overnight. Might be a good thing to add to the recipe.

My 3 logs are chilling in the fridge to cut/bake later. Recommendations:o Use a paring knife or other smallish sharp knife to cut the dough--see video.o Resist the urge to bake scraps right away. Instead, refrigerate them, wrapped, with the other unbaked dough, segregated by flavor, for use in patching.o If the 9 strips per log aren't all the same length (likely), manipulate scraps to make them match better.o Refrigerate dough at all stages on a rimmed half-sheet pan for ease in handling.

I baked a test batch and froze the rest for later baking. I used TJ’s vanilla bean paste instead of extract. Cookies turned out delicious & look very impressive, but the crumbly doughs were challenging to work with. I’d recommend letting the strips come to room temp before assembling so that they’re more pliable. For the next batches I plan to give the sides of the thawed, assembled logs a quick once-over with a rolling pin before slicing to give the edges a neater finish.

Epic fail. The strawberry dough is entirely too crumbly to roll out. Made strawberry cookies with it - not very good. Was able to get the chocolate and vanilla to roll out and made a layered cookie. Again not very good cookies. So much time, effort, and ingredients wasted for mediocre tasting cookies. They are all going in the garbage - or maybe I’ll leave them for the raccoons

4.5 hours start to in fridge for overnight chill including clean up.

Thank you for making this video:) Seeing you wrap the mixer with the clean dish towel when first mixing in the flour will save me hundreds of future cleaning hours--genius idea! I love this recipe the most because you can do all the work early and have beautifully freshly baked cookies coming out of the oven, aroma wafting in the house, just as company is arriving, making my Christmas relaxing instead of STRESSED! Can't wait to make these.

I made these for Christmas and will again for Easter. You can get creative with the 3rd flavor if strawberries aren't your thing. I also made them as tri color style cookies. Everyone loved them. I see some bad reviews, but they appear to have not followed the directions about rolling in plastic. Video is very helpful.

These are yummy. I’ve also used raspberry powder rather than strawberry. An option is to slice thinner, cook for less time and then sandwich 2 cookies with vanilla icing. That’s also a good way to use up the ends and leftover dough rolled into a log then sliced.

These came out perfect!Made the recipe exactly as written except I used a hand mixer. I prefer it to my stand mixer when working with small quantities like in this recipe.Be patient when you’re mixing the flour into all three doughs. Everything looked very, very dry at first. After about 2-3 minutes with the hand mixer, the dough formed the pea-sized crumbs the recipe mentioned. I also rested the doughs overnight in the fridge before assembling. Very satisfying to cut and look at!

Or, reduce the flour even further? Maybe 1cup instead of 1 1/4?

I’m in Colorado. The vanilla dough was moist enough to set/cut. The strawberry & chocolate were way too dry and crumbly. Should I add more butter & egg yolk since I’m at a higher elevation and it’s so dry here?? It was an epic fail!

Just baked these. Really worth the effort!

The chocolate and strawberry mixtures remained sandy; they never formed a dough. (I followed the recipe to a tee.) With lots of effort to press, roll and chill the sand, I managed to salvage about half the dough but the rest crumbled everywhere, made a mess and ended up in the bin. Adding cream or more egg might help. The cookies that did turn out were just okay. Next time, I'll look for a different checkerboard cookie recipe.

I substituted barista-grade matcha powder for the cocoa powder 1:1 by weight and they turned out perfect! The taste was just right. I added a touch of red gel coloring to the strawberry portion to account for browning and I think that was the right call. I did 2 overnight rests in the fridge. These are totally worth the effort!

We substituted 2 tablespoons of matcha green tea powder for the dried strawberries. It worked well for colour and was just a little strong in taste, so next time will try 1.5 tablespoons.

Not bad. Not amazing. Definitely had a hard time sticking together, I would form them while malleable, then refrigerate and maybe even freeze. The taste is subtle but for the most part nice. Probably not worth the effort to make again, but very cute. I wanted to love them.

These cookies were fabulous, but very difficult to make. The dough kept crumbling and I struggled to keep it together with egg white. Perhaps, the moisture in NY is greater than LA and that accounted for for the dryness of the dough which caused the crumbling.

I found the video demo too persnickety: my hack is to roll out squares of approximately equal size and thickness, stack them, cut the strips and then assemble as per the pattern. Once I trimmed the edges they looked fine; even better, they were delicious. Done is better than perfect, especially during the holidays!

Really try to be better about the ruler next time

Way too much work for the results. The texture of eggy shortbread is unpleasantly chewy and very much inferior to the classic recipe and you lose the butter flavour.

I struggled with these cookies; I found that each of the doughs was terribly crumbly, and didn't come together well even when rolling it out. I ended up cutting my losses and making three layer stripes rather than the checker board, and they were quite delicious. I made them a second time, removing a tablespoon of flour from each mixture, and the dough came together more easily. No need to use all three egg whites; use a single egg white and make merengues with the other two!