Cookies, Baked The 3D Printer Way

Imagine for a moment that the Cookie Monster is going to visit, but all the cookie baking utensils in your house have been mislaid. The horror! Fortunately [Startup Chuck] is here with a video showing the process of baking cookies in a 3D printer, and as an extra treat he’s using entirely 3D printed utensils too.

The utensils are comprehensive array of all you’d need for serious cookie production, even going as far as to print a mixing bowl and beater for a KitchenAid mixer. There are scoops aplenty, and something we’re particularly impressed with, a spatula with a TPU blade. We’re guessing that FDM prints might not be the best for cooking because all manner of food could get caught in those layer lines and go off, but let’s face it, this is a bit of fun rather than a forever cooking project. We like the AI generated spork for its near-flatness, reminding us of our AI-generated breakfast. Finally he even prints a cookie baking sheet using nylon filament.

An enclosed 3D printer makes a surprisingly effective low-temperature oven, with the heated bed as the element. It works, and makes recognizable cookies, though they’re not browned. As entertaining as this experiment may be, we can’t recommend following his example — at the very least, moisture and food ingredients in your printer probably aren’t conducive to good future printing.

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Building A Semi-Auto Cookie Dough Gun

Are you a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur? Do you want to eat more cookies than you probably should at the push of a button? Don’t worry, [Startup Chuck] has got you covered with his semi-automatic cookie dough dispenser.

[Startup Chuck] tries several ways of dispensing dough, some of which more explosive than others. Turns out that a homemade pneumatic extruder doesn’t exactly rhyme with “safety”. The other methods are more promising dough though, and an empty caulk tube sourced from Amazon and a motorized caulking gun demonstrate a less dangerous, more effective way to dispense dough.

Inspired by this approach, he started development of a servo-driven extruder. It uses store-bought dough cylinders in a sleek metal and acrylic contraption that is then treated with the requisite big mess of wires any good project has. As the dough is extruded, an optical sensor detects how far the dough has moved and it uses sufficiently violent pneumatics to slice the dough, which has the fun side effect of launching pucks of cookie dough at the user.

If you like the idea of edible extrusions, but aren’t so concerned about the rapid-fire element of this project, the concept isn’t unlike some of the food printers we’ve covered.

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3D Printed Cookies, Sort Of

Are there any cookies that taste better than the ones you make yourself? Well, maybe, but there’s a certain exquisite flavoring to effort. Just ask [jformulate], who created these custom chocolate-topped butter cookies using a mixture of 3D printing, silicone, and of course, baking and tempering.

[jformulate] did this project along with a makerspace group, and the first thing they did was decide on some images for the cookies. Once a hexagon-shaped mold was created in Fusion360, the images were added in. Some had to be height-adjusted in order for the detail to come out.

Once these positives were printed, it was time to make the food-safe silicone molds that would form the custom chocolate toppers. If you don’t have a vacuum de-gasser, [jformulate] recommends pouring a thin stream from a high place to avoid air bubbles. You can always tap the mold several times on a flat surface as well to bring trapped air to the top.

Finally, it’s time to make cookies. [jformulate] has good instructions for tempering chocolate, as well as a recipe for the butter cookies that support the designs. As a bonus, [jformulate] shows how to make a fish-shaped hot chocolate bomb, and made Jolly Rancher (sadly not Wrencher) medallions using the silicone molds and a microwave.

For the semi-disappointed, directly 3D printing cookies is definitely a thing.

Machine Learning In The Kitchen Makes For Tasty Mashup Desserts

What did you do during lockdown? A whole lot of people turned to baking in between trips to the store to search for toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Many of them baked bread for some reason, but like us, [Sara Robinson] turned to sweeter stuff to get through it.

The first Cakie ever made. Image via Google Cloud

Her pandemic ponderings wandered into the realm of baking existentialist questions, like what separates baked goods from each other, categorically speaking? What is the science behind the crunchiness of cookies, the sponginess of cake, and the fluffiness of bread?

As a developer advocate for Google Cloud, [Sara] turned to machine learning to figure out why the cookie crumbles. She collected 33 recipes each of cookies, cake, and bread and built a TensorFlow model to analyze them, which resulted in a cookie/cake/bread lineage for each recipe in a set of percentages. Not only was the model able to accurately classify recipes by type, [Sara] was able to use the model to come up with a 50/50 cookie-cake hybrid recipe. The AI delivered a list of ingredients to which she added vanilla extract and chocolate chips for flavor. From there, she had to wing it and come up with her own baking directions for the Cakie.

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Hackaday Podcast 054: Xenomorph Cookies, 101 Uses For Hot Glue, Rolling Robots, And A Clippy Computer

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys reflect on great hacks of the past few days. Strain relief is something every electronics geek encounters and there’s a spiffy way to make your hot-glue look like a factory connector. There’s something in the air and it seems to be recreating early computers. Did you know astronauts are baking cookies they’re forbidden to eat? And did you hear about the 3D printer that’s being fed oil from the deep fryer?

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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First Space Cookies: Cosmic Cooking Is Half-Baked

For decades, astronauts have been forced to endure space-friendly MREs and dehydrated foodstuffs, though we understand both the quality and the options have increased with time. But if we’re serious about long-term space travel, colonizing Mars, or actually having a restaurant at the end of the universe, the ability to bake and cook from raw ingredients will become necessary. This zero-gravity culinary adventure might as well start with a delicious experiment, and what better than chocolate chip cookies for the maiden voyage?

That little filtered vent lets steam out and keeps crumbs in. Image via Zero-G Kitchen

The vessel in question is the Zero-G Oven, built in a collaboration between Zero-G Kitchen and Nanoracks, a Texas-based company that provides commercial access to space. In November 2019, Nanoracks sent the Zero-G oven aloft, where it waited a few weeks for the bake-off to kick off. Five pre-formed cookie dough patties had arrived a few weeks earlier, each one sealed inside its own silicone baking pouch.

The Zero-G Oven is essentially a rack-mounted cylindrical toaster oven. It maxes out at 325 °F (163 °C), which is enough heat for Earth cookies if you can wait fifteen minutes or so. But due to factors we haven’t figured out yet, the ISS cookies took far longer to bake.

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3D Printed Cookie Molds For The Best Speculoos

Experiencing nostalgia for the outstanding Belgian cuisine [Adam], currently stuck in Ohio, found himself in craving some home-made speculoos. For the uninitiated, speculoos is what those brown cookies usually served with coffee on planes dream of becoming one day.

To add some extra regional flavour, [Adam] decided to print his own molds featuring motifs from Brussels. The risks of 3D prints in the kitchen are the subject of a lively discussion. They are addressed in this project by recommending the use of food safe filament and sealant for the molds. The fact that the dough will be removed from the molds almost instantly and that the molds don’t go into the oven puts the risks in the vicinity of using plastic cutting boards in your kitchen.

[Adam]’s write up features solid, well illustrated baking instructions that should enable any of you to replicate this delicacy. Some links to additional references and two recipes are thrown in for good measure. The article finishes with detailed instructions for designing your own molds that take the properties of the medium into account, to ensure your custom motif will still be recognizable after baking. Line art with a stroke width of around 2-3 mm seems to work best. It is that time of year and we hope to see a lot more tricks to take your cookie and edible house designs to the next level so don’t forget to send in a tip.

With 3D printed molds having been used to shape resin, silicone and even metal, we are at a point where cookie dough looks like a natural progression.