Preparation

• Prepare a block of shortcrust pastry, to which you add a teaspoon of liqueur (Flavia used Strega, but she already told me she wants to try with Sambuca next time).

  👉 If I had had cream at home, and if Flavia hadn’t wanted to surprise me by keeping secret what she intended to produce 😀 I would have suggested the cream shortcrust pastry recipe, perhaps more suitable for the handling that these rainbow cookies require, but in any case, you can use whichever shortcrust pastry you prefer, the important thing is that it’s elastic enough.

  Divide the block into 7 parts and color 6 of them, each separately, leaving the seventh portion (larger than the others) in its natural color.

  To get the colors of the rainbow, you only need the three primary colors and mix them to obtain all the colors, each in a separate cup or container.

  The total amount of coloring used is what I show you in the photo, which is about half a vial for red and blue, a quarter of a vial for yellow.

  

• Color the 6 portions of shortcrust pastry, making sure to color the smallest ball purple.

  If you have food-safe gloves it can be a good idea to use them, Flavia didn’t use them and I won’t tell you how her hands looked in the end. 😀

  

• The colored shortcrust pastry balls should first be rolled on themselves like small sausages or loaves and then rolled out with the rolling pin, all except the purple one which should remain as a small sausage.

  Of this phase (i.e., rolling out and making the roll) I have no photos to show you because Flavia was too focused on making it to think about taking photos (rightly so!), but I’m happy she photographed the colored portions because it’s a very useful photo).

  If we make this recipe again in the future, I’ll add the missing photos, but you’ll see that by following these instructions well, you won’t have problems making these cookies.

  After making the purple loaf and rolling out the blue one with the rolling pin, in a shape as rectangular as possible, wrap the purple sausage in the blue rectangle.

  Trim any excess dough to minimize overlapping.

  At this point, roll out all portions following the color order as shown in the photo (after blue, green, then yellow, then orange, and finally red) and wrap them all in this sequence until you get a roll with a purple heart and the last red layer.

  Try as much as possible to join each layer from the same side to avoid dough overlapping in different parts of the roll.

  Cut the ends and then cut the roll in half, starting the cut at the overlap point as it is the most irregular part.

  Wrap each half with the white dough (i.e., the portion of uncolored dough).

  Place each half on the work surface, obviously on the flat side, and slice with a smooth-bladed knife to get rainbow-shaped cookies.

  

• Place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper,

  

• and bake at 356°F for 10, at most 15 minutes.

  

• Have fun!!

  

• And here’s how they look inside!

  

• Oh! I forgot to tell you that the trimmings and poorly made cookies shouldn’t be thrown away! They’ll turn out great anyway! 😀

  

• Make them too! And then send me the photos!

  NB: online, there are quite a few rainbow cookies like these, especially after this quarantine period during which the hashtag #andratuttobene went viral. My daughter had seen some videos on Instagram some time ago and wanted to try to recreate them completely independently and, in my humble opinion, with good intuition, especially in creating the colors. To be honest, she wasn’t at all satisfied with the purple color because in the raw dough it looked more brown than purple to her, but after baking the color was perfect. It was really a great satisfaction for her to get such well-made cookies. (Again… mother’s heart! 😄)