Made these using the Washington Post's recipe. It's just a basic sugar cookie, but obviously made into this Appalachian-inspired quilt pattern that I genuinely really love.
From the cookbook Pieometry. Picked one of the easier recipes!
I wonder how many weeks I’m going to make rainbow cookies fit the brief 😂🤣
I think we’re at at least 2 if not 3. Anyways. They’re always a hit - made them for my daughter’s birthday party for the adults.
I used leftover homemade pastry and I just couldn’t get it to brown properly. Plus my flowers fell apart. Other than that, it’s great 🤣
Recipe: here
For Geometric week, I wasn't that much inspired at first since my attitude towards baking was that I wasn't so concerned with the look of my bakes as much as the taste, think the opposite of what Amaury Guichon would do, but when I remembered about Penrose tiling patterns, I got to work.
Cutting cookies is such a hassle but I also realized the labor of love that goes into handmade cookies like these. The flavor is very plain since they're sugar cookies with just a touch of pandan and sakura flavoring for the green and pink ones, respectively. They were also firm to bite, and some of the pink sakura cookies got a little toasty since I forgot to monitor their baking time. Overall, I got to learn cutting cookies, rolling them in a uniform thickness, and managing their soft/hardness by bringing them in and out of the fridge.
Added FYI for the slightly math nerds, here is a link for Penrose tiling. Long story short, if you had tiling that were uniformly squares or triangles or hexagons, they were periodic i.e. their patterns repeat, whereas with Penrose tiling, they were aperiodic, i.e. their patterns do no repeat.
Another Claire Saffitz recipe! I made a non-refined sugar version for the kids and made them into little trifles for easier eating.
I liked this recipe but had made the cake ahead of time and froze it. I know it isn’t supposed to impact taste but felt as if the cake was a bit dense and dry - I can’t tell if that was because of the cornmeal or because I overbaked it.
Anyways it was still yummy and tasty and everyone enjoyed it!
Checkerboard cookies are one of my “white whales” when it comes to baking. They either spread and I lose the carefully created pattern, or all my best efforts at precision measuring come to naught and the pattern is wonky, or has gaps where the pieces didn’t fit perfectly together. Aren’t slice and bake cookies supposed to be easy?
Happily, I think these are my best effort yet - the shapes stayed fairly crisp and defined, they didn’t spread, and they even kept most of their square shape in the oven though the corners did round out a little. There are still a few gaps where the dough wasn’t 100% flush, but I’m super happy with the progress.
I’m not sure the cherry flavor really came through, despite using freeze-dried cherry powder - they mostly taste like amaretto/almond extract. But that’s okay! I’m considering these a major win!
I’m so old I have a recipe for black bean brownies that I tore out of a magazine. This batch was… fine. Definitely better the next day after the flavors got to know each other. I will keep the recipe in case I need to feed someone who is on a restricted diet, but these are just acceptable, not amazing.