It doesn’t affect the delicious flavor, not of the black and not of the white (or not of the ebony, not of the ivory, if you prefer). But for those who don’t want to have less of one flavor than of the other when it comes to the incomparable black-and-white butter shortbread cookies of Sweetish Hill, it’s worthy of note that once again they are being formed by an artist of the precise.

In these cookies, a beautiful plain butter-and-sugar dough flavored with true vanilla is married to its pastry twin to which a substantial amount of quality chocolate has been added. This cookie dough is the kind that is formed into a log, ether square or round, and then sliced before baking.

For a long time, the pale and the dark doughs had just been randomly pressed together before slicing. If you asked for a dozen cookies, some might be mostly plain sugar-vanilla and some might be mostly chocolate.

At home, I’ve always made this general type of cookie so that each one is square, with stacked alternating stripes of chocolate and plain, two of each.

Now there’s a master of detail forming these cookies at Sweetish Hill. Every cookie is now pretty much half chocolate, no matter what. The most recent batches bought have been square, not round.

Some have been split down the middle vertically (or horizontally, depending on which way the cookies are set out). And lately sometimes these cookies are quartered, just like a coat of arms (in appearance resembling four squares of a chess- or checker-board).

The cookbook produced for Sweetish Hill’s twentieth anniversary does contain a recipe for the oh-so-delicious gingerbread cookies (butter, sugar, fresh-ground ginger-root, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, molasses, eggs, and all the rest of the good stuff that goes into incomparable treats like these), but black-and-white cookies remain the bakery’s secret.

And now they’re once again uniform and evenly divided. So there’s no longer any purpose to be served by asking to receive mostly chocolate or mostly plain cookies.