Black And White Cookie Doughnuts Are The Newest Food Abomination

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
The wheel turns and nothing is new, the saying goes. Except some things are.
When our ancestors moved here from the shtetls of Europe, they were not expecting to find their culinary traditions so universally beloved, to the extent that everyone felt the colonialist urge to sink their teeth into them. But sink their teeth they did, and the result? Black and white cookie doughnuts.
“The great thing about black and white cookies is the proportion of icing to cake is perfect in black and white cookies,” said the Forward’s editor-in-chief Jane Eisner. “They’re New York, they’re Jewish…this is blasphemy.”
Since 2016, the stalwart doughnut producers at Doughnut Plant have been doing their very best to ruin a Jewish staple, churning out 1,000 of these monstrosities a week.
The New York Daily News revealed that “while the doughnut might look like a half-black and half-white doughnut, it’s actually a half dark chocolate cake dough, with Valrhona chocolate glaze doughnut on one half, and a white chocolate dough with glaze doughnut on the other.”
It’s a complicated reimagining of a bakery classic, and while it doesn’t have to exist, traditions are made to broken, and so are hearts, and these probably taste pretty darn good.
Shira Feder is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected]
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