Recipe for candy corn cookies

I've had two requests, so here's the recipe for the Candy Corn Cookies I just made. :)

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Also:
3/4 tsp orange extract
About 1/4 tsp orange icing color (also called paste food color)
1 square (1 oz) unsweetened chocolate

In a medium bowl, beat butter and sugar together till fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat till just combined. Slowly add flour, baking powder, and salt until combined. Divide the dough into three more-or-less equal portions.

Line a 9x5x3-inch loaf pan with waxed paper, leaving long edges so it can easily be folded over later. Cutting out the corners will make it a bit easier to line the pan.

To one portion of dough, add icing color until it's as orange as you want it. Add orange extract until it tastes as orange as you want it. Can you tell I didn't measure this part very precisely? :)

When I made this recipe I added 1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts to the orange dough, but now I think we should leave that out-- it detracts from the smooth candy corn effect.

Melt the square of unsweetened chocolate and mix it into another portion of dough.

Spoon the chocolate dough into the lined loaf pan, and spread it out with a spoon until it's a fairly even layer. (It's a bit tricky because the wax paper slides around, but you'll get there.)

Smooth the orange dough on top of the chocolate dough, and then smooth the vanilla dough on top of that. Fold over the wax paper and chill the dough for at least an hour. Longer is better-- makes the dough firmer and easier to slice.

Lift the waxed paper to remove the dough from the pan. Cut the dough crosswise in pieces about 1/4 to 1/8 inch thick. It's nice if all the cookies on one sheet are about the same thickness, so they'll cook at the same rate.

Cut each rectangular piece into triangles. See the post below for pictures of all this. It's easiest to cut the dough on wax paper or parchment paper.

Lay the triangles on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 350 °F for about nine minutes. Bake time depends on how thick the cookies are, so if I were you I'd start watching carefully after eight minutes and take the cookies out as soon as there's any sign of edges turning brown.

It's best to let the cookies cool and harden before transferring them anywhere.

Ta-daaa!

I adapted this recipe from one that my mom cut from a magazine eighteen years ago. Here's a picture of the original recipe, and these are the changes you want to make for the original Neapolitan cookies.

Instead of orange color and extract, add five drops of liquid red food coloring and 1/2 tsp almond extract to that portion of dough. It'll taste vaguely like strawberry.

Add 1/2 cups finely chopped walnuts to the vanilla dough.

The chocolate dough is the same.

Layer the three doughs in a loaf pan with vanilla in the middle. Chill to firm. Then cut the dough in half lengthwise so you have two long rectangular blocks of dough. Cut each block crosswise into pieces 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Bake at 350 °F for about ten minutes. These cookies are rectangles instead of triangles.