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We’ve all seen those holiday cookies with pictures inside. You buy a roll of dough, slice the cookies, and bake. Kids love them, no matter how they taste. How do they get those pictures inside? Couldn’t you do something like this at home?
Yes, you can! Unless you’ve got a commercial-grade extruder with programmable patterns, they won’t be exactly the same. They might be better!
The easiest pattern to make into sliced cookies is the pinwheel. These pinwheel cookies were made by Arundati at Escapades, where she posted the recipe. You make a layer of chocolate dough and a layer of vanilla dough, stack the two and roll them up together. When the roll is sliced, the cookies have a spiral pattern. It’s the same concept as a jellyroll. But that’s only the beginning of the patterns you can make.
Divide the dough into more pieces, and you can make more complicated patterns. Florence posted the recipe for her checkerboard cookies and the process for making them, with pictures. You cut the dough into blocks and stack them in a checkerboard pattern, then slice them as you would a roll of dough.
With more blocks and more colors, you can make even more complicated patterns. Eva Funderburgh makes pixelated cookies. With this method, patterns like these skulls and carrots are possible. The skull pattern is 9×9 pixels, or 81 colored rods of dough!
Funderburgh posted instructions for making your own pixel cookies at Instructables, and in this Flickr set, where you can see some more examples of the finished product. I love how the rods of dough are made using a Play-Doh extruder. Now you wish you hadn’t thrown that out when your kids quit playing with it!
If you can make pixel cookies, the next step is to make fractal cookies. Windell at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories took a process he used with clay and translated it into cookie dough. The result is these Sierpinski cookies (modeled on pattern of the the Sierpinski carpet). You start with somewhat the same process as the checkerboard cookies, but stretch out a portion of your finished block to a much smaller and longer size, then stack the smaller blocks together -and then do it again!
The limit to the “infinite fractal” comes at the point where you’d rather eat cookies than stretch cookie dough again!
Yay cookies! Now I’m having a major craving for them. Cookies!
posted by JD on 9-25-2008 at 7:37 am
I’ll just take the cookie dough, please. :-D
posted by nutmeag on 9-25-2008 at 8:38 am
From my limited experience with refrigerated cookie rolls, the real secret to success is knowing how cold and how warm the dough should be for each step of the process. You’re not going to get it perfect the first time around, so don’t give up after one attempt!
posted by Miss Cellania on 9-25-2008 at 9:38 am
Oh. Man. Dorky cookies are my fav.
posted by Adrienne on 9-25-2008 at 10:06 am
Yeah, dorky food of any sort is an Adrienne favorite.
posted by adrienne on 9-25-2008 at 10:25 am
Am I the only one that doesn’t like sugar cookies?
posted by Zach on 9-25-2008 at 10:54 am
What do you call a chocolate chip cookie with no chocolate chips?
This isn’t the opening line to a joke - I’d really like to know!
reCAPTCHA: sugar Nobody
posted by alice on 9-25-2008 at 12:50 pm
I might have to try this one day…:D
reCaptcha-baking The
posted by Myleti on 9-25-2008 at 1:04 pm
Hey, alice, I’ve always wondered that too! I love chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips. Chocolate chipless cookies? Maybe?
posted by Eileen on 9-25-2008 at 8:01 pm
Zach–
Yes.
posted by Pointy-Hatted Geek on 9-25-2008 at 8:53 pm
I believe chocolate chip cookies w/o chocolate chips are just a variation of sugar cookies. (If you believe the history/legend of the Toll House Cookie)
posted by steph on 9-25-2008 at 11:00 pm
I’m sort of in the same boat about the chocolate chipless cookies. Whenever I go food shopping, the aisle is filled with “Super Mega Chocolate Cookies” “Ultra Chocolate Chunk Cookies” and “Even Our Chocolate Chips Have Chocolate Chips On Them Cookies”. Just once, I’d like to see “Just A Pinch Of Chocolate Chips” or “One Chocolate Chip Per Bite”.
An ex boyfriend of mine had a grandmother who lived to bake, and we always asked her to make them with just a few chips. They were delicious. :)
posted by cb on 9-26-2008 at 1:21 pm
Oh, and Pillsbury also has ready-to-bake S’More’s cookies. They’re graham cracker cookies with chocolate and marshmallow. My son and I have renamed them “THE MOST DELICIOUS COOKIES EVER”!
posted by cb on 9-26-2008 at 1:23 pm
My favorite cookie ever is a pinwheel cookie–Coffee Toffee Swirls. The recipe is from a Family Circle or some such from the mid 90s. One later has cocoa powder and instant espresso added, the other layer toffee bits. Yum.
posted by Julia on 9-27-2008 at 3:29 pm