Sierpinski Cookies

Posted by: Jeremy Karnowski | February 17, 2010

Sierpinski Cookies

Roughly a year ago, my friend Ben sent me a link to Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ website with the added message, “If anyone were to make something this crazy, it would totally be you. Math and cooking. Crazy!” The website, as you will see when you visit it, builds off an earlier website that tried to make pixelated cookies so you could create baking masterpieces designed off your favorite retro video games.

Well, in the mathematical spirit of the website, I experimented with their iterated method of making cookies. The concept of the cookies is based on Sierpinski’s Carpet, a well known figure found in Mathematics, which after the procedure is applied infinitely, the figure actually has an area of zero.

Since reality will not allow us to do this procedure infinitely nor would cookies with zero area be exciting (although, jokingly, you could show other people an empty pan and declare you’ve one-upped me by doing the procedure infinitely, but you would be without delicious cookies), I joined the creators of the website by only following the pattern a few times.

The recipe was based on a butter cookie recipe, found here, except that part of the dough was vanilla and part of it was chocolate (I used some giardelli for this part! oh yeah). This left the cookies tasting very similar to shortbread cookies, something I had never tried to make.

Actually, I should insert this comment here… I can not recall a time where I have actually made cookies on my own. Cutting a long piece of dough found in a pre-packaged container and then baking does not count. I’ve made a few batches of cookies with others, but I find that I was more on the sidelines. So, what better way to make cookies than by going insanely complicated?!

But beware, the cookies took about 3 hours to create and I only managed to get roughly 24 cookies out of it. This could be changed by a few things I learned while making them. First off, make a lot more dough so you can create more cookies. The creation of the dough is all in one step, so adding more ingredients here will basically be the same amount of time, but you’ll get more cookies. Second, I was unable to get the chocolate dough to bind together, so as in a comment I found on one of the sites, I used some egg in the chocolate dough part. Have the eggs ready already. Third, when combining the 9 segments together, 1 chocolate and 8 vanilla, make the chocolate part in the middle longer than the surrounding pieces. I found, either because the chocolate dough was less malleable or because of the way I was elongating the dough, the middle pieces began to disappear on the ends. This made it so I had to cut off parts of the ends to make all the shapes show. I had quite a bit of extra dough I cut off that could have been incorporated.

So, those are my lessons learned, and now for some pictures. Below is the steps involved. Ingredients to balls of dough to simple colored pieces to first and second iterations to final product. If you have any questions, just post and I’ll make sure to give you the info you need.