Inventive Baking Ideas Sought for Imaginary Cookies (A Mostly Nonsense Post)

[radiantfracture]

Do you anxiety bake? Does stirring batter induce a soothing flow state in you? Me too!

I also love autogenerated and random language poetry. I don't know what the connection might be. Anyway, here's a mostly nonsensical project.

I'd really quite like to derive real recipes for the imaginary cookies generated by the AI in the latest AI Weirdness post, particularly the following:

• Lord's Honey Fight (which sounds DELICIOUS)
• Fluffin Coffee Drops
• Quitterbread Bars (v. Harry Pottery)
• Merry Hunga Poppers
• Hand Buttersacks
• Hallowy Maples (also delicious)
• Apricot Dream Moles

If a recipe arises that seems workable, I will undertake to make it over the winter break and post the results.

Any thoughts or inspirations? How do the names work for you as prompts for sense-images and baking algorithms?






(All images originally from AI Weirdness)

First Reflections on Imaginary Cookies

The drawing in the post for Lord's Honey Fight shows a sort of cinnamon-roll-esque device. I think that's clever, but I'm not sure it's grand enough for a Lord's Honey Fight. Might that be a big pan of bars like a delicious, delicious field of mediaeval battle?

I'm thinking Fluffin Coffee Drops could be whipped shortbread with coffee flavouring. (I don't love whipped shortbread, but with coffee and a flurky name, maybe.)

Hallowy maples I see more or less as just a dish of cookie full of maple syrup. Maybe maple butter tarts (a real thing I had once and have never forgotten).

I was actually given a jar of homemade apricot jam that seems ideal for Apricot Dream Moles.

{rf}

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Whipped shortbread is what some people seem to think is shortbread, and is made with icing sugar.

Proper shortbread contains only brown sugar, butter, flour and one egg yolk, and is made by my mother.

[isis]

Proper shortbread contains only brown sugar, butter, flour and one egg yolk, and is made by my mother.

FYP. This is the recipe

(icing sugar? WTF? Yuck.)

(okay sometimes I add rosemary and pine nuts)

[radiantfracture]

Ha.

The egg yolk version actually comes from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, and is our family tradition, so I will have to die on that hill of buttery goodness.

[wendelah1]

I have the 1990 edition, revised by Marion Cunningham, which doesn't have your family's recipe, I am sad to say.

[radiantfracture]

I think the edition was my grandmother's, originally, and dates from the mid-fifties. I'll check when I visit later this month. It's a hardback with a softly gleaming gold cover.

I covet it -- I have a later edition, but it's not at all the same.

It's very simple -- my mom and I have a standing joke where I ask her for the recipe again every year.

Shortbread

1 c butter
1/2 c brown sugar
2 c flour (give or take)
1 egg yolk

Do the usual things, but add the flour gradually until the consistency is "like putty" and don't let any other liquid get in. Roll out about 1/4" thick and cut with a cookie cutter into rustic seasonal shapes. Bake at 325 F.

Don't overhandle and don't add too much flour.

* * * * * *

I can see the point of the cornstarch, but I've never liked the soft whippy shortbread compared to the solid slabs of my youth.

[wendelah1]

Looking through my recipe collection and the internet baking sites, icing sugar isn't that uncommon a choice. The Fanny Farmer Baking Book (1984 ed. by Marion Cunningham--damn but I'm old) has three versions: one made with confectioner's sugar, one with white sugar, and one with brown.

My favorite recipe, which I got from the daughter of a patient I took care of (I still have her handwritten copy), uses regular sugar but adds a quarter cup of cornstarch/4 cups of flour. It tenderizes the cookie a bit, I think, and I assume that's why some bakers (and eaters) prefer using icing sugar.

[radiantfracture]

icing sugar isn't that uncommon a choice

I am sure they are perfectly nice cookies for someone.