printing cookies

Printing cookies day #6

Cooking,

Today a new war starts at 3DC 😉 We are not going to stop until we get a reliable 3d cookie dough that holds its shape once is cooked. Cookies 4 LIFE!!

We are going to start analysing our recipe to see what is the cause that makes our cookies to collapse in the oven.

But first lets learn more about what happens inside an oven baking cookies.

This are the ingredients of our first test cookie dough recipe:

  • Soft butter 250gr, confectionary sugar 250gr, 1 egg, flour 600gr and vanilla extract.

For our test we are going to be reducing the amount of ingridients to get less dough. 1/3.

  • Soft butter 84gr, confectionary sugar 84gr, 1/3 egg, flour 200gr and vanilla extract.

From all the ingredients butter is the one with lower melting point. And might be the reason why the cookie collapse. Probably not the only one. But the first that affects before the egg protein start tangling together giving more structural support, not sure if its enough, though. So first we are going to test a batch of cookies without butter.

Butter is approximately 16-17% water. Trying to balance the lack of butter’s water we are going to add a whole egg. Hoping the extra egg protein coagulation also helps holding the shape.

  • Confectionary sugar 84gr, 1 egg (57gr), flour 200gr, vanilla extract and salt 2gr.

To add extra toughness we are using bread making flour, hopefully the extra gluten will help too holding the shape. Also we are adding salt to strength the gluten network.

Ok. Lets prepare the dough and see the consistency.

After mixing for over 6 minutes the dough does not hold together (crumbles). Since we want to play safe instead of adding water, we are going to add and extra egg.

After the second egg the dough is too soft. Going to add flour one spoon at a time to get the right consistency. 5 spoons later the consistency is better. The dough is elastic but pretty hard.

Setting up to 6 bars the pressure, the extruder can not handle it at enough speed. TOO HARD. We frozen some samples and deepfried one of them it hold its shape properly. Taste more like a dense sweet bread. Another recipe would be needed to test this.

Even if the dough was to thick to print, we manually prepared some cookies to test the results in the oven.

First try. 180ºC for almost 20 minutes untils it was brown outside.

first cookie

first cookie result

Second try. 200ºC for 20 minutes. This one is more obvious that has collapsed, but did not had a complete base.

second cookie

second cookie

Second cookie result

Second cookie result

Cookie cut off

To us it feels almost like bread, with tough crust but with the sugar sweetness. Maybe we should try some bread. Maybe we sould try some breadsticks instead?

Another fail day and one day closer to the solution! More experiments coming soon!

References:

arrow cookie test result

Printing cookies day #5 Deep-frying part3

Cooking, Dev,

After our first attempt at deep frying printing cookies using batter, we wanted to give it a bigger shot and test a little bit more this post processing cooking technique.

arrow cookie test

arrow cookie test

arrow cookie test result

arrow cookie test result

We wanted to test a more diverse set of shapes to observe how the hot oil bath affected to them. First we did double check that the batter was the mix that avoid cookies melting. Easy test no batter = melted, with batter holds the shape.

Even if the cookie has been battered any crack of the overlaid batter during the deep fried process might allow the inside of the cookie to scape (melting and leaking) before cooking. That is why with some of the tests ended up with a cookie-batter shell for some parts of the print.

Another important point is that the shape swims freely, thus is hard to keep accuracy (+/- mm) because the bath deforms the print. This is quite obvious in the next pictures.

Oval shape test

Oval shape test

Oval shape test result

Oval shape test result

In the previous pictures is observed how the oval shapes turns into a flatten circle. For this test the cookie was put in the oil and let it swim freely. Our guess, the water boiling from the cookie surface pushes and forces the cookie to move and deform.

To solve that first we tried a dipping the cookie using a wood stick. Forcing the cookie to stay “still” during its bath.

Testing stick-fryiing

Testing stick-frying

sitck test result

stick test result

We got some better results, meaning not getting a flattened design. After that we tried using a spatula. And finally a deep fryer wire basket (best one). The square shape and the arrow were deep fried using the wire basket. Results were much better specially for the arrow.

square test

square test

square test support

square test support

square test result

Conclusions

3D printed frozen cookie dipped into batter and deep fried works. We are not going to say is the best digital cooking technique, due to lack of control, consistency and accuracy for the prints. But still is better than flat cookies ;).

Despite the general opinion we do not think deep fried cookies taste bad, they have a crumbly texture, with a crunchy outside. Obviously the type of oil, temperature and how dirty it is has a major IMPACT.

at 3DC we are committed to get a 3d printed cookie recipe that can be baked, so we will proceed on that line even though is try new things.

3d printed cookie

Printing cookies day #1

Cooking, Dev,

Cookies are fun.

Cookie-cutters are fun. Baking cookies is fun. Do we need more excuses to start some printing cookies experiments?

Thanks a lot to Lola’s Cake for helping us out a lot to get into the cookie world.

This are the ingredients for our first try cookie dough recipe:

  • Soft butter (mantega pomada) 250gr
  • Confectionary sugar (azucar glass) 250gr
  • 1 egg
  • Flour 600gr
  • Aroma
printing cookies ingridients

printing cookies ingridients

Mix the butter and the confectionery sugar until you have a creamy texture for 6 to 8 minutes. Add the egg and keep mixing until it is incorporated. Later sieve the flour and add it to the mix until you have a uniform cookie dough. Add aroma.

cookies process

cookies process

Once we have our dough ready is time to check the pressure that our air compressed extruder needs. We are using a 4mm nozzle. And the loaded cartridge weights around 250gr (cartridge + cookie dough).

Wow, it is a thick dough. After some extruding test, consistency is quiet good, but the dough is not elastic enough to hold together. Extruding pressure goes all the way up to 5 bars and the flow it is still quite slow.

Brittle cookie dough

Brittle cookie dough

We added 50ml of milk to the dough and remix. check the side by side pictures.

dough comparison

dough comparison

The dough samples were “hammered” to show how the one with milk (left) is more elastic also has less consistency. Also now with just 2 bars we have enough flow to start printing. For a 4mm nozzle a layer height of 1.5mm seems to give the best results for up to 30mm height.

3d printed cookie

3d printed cookie

We printed 7 cookies that we are going to use in our baking experiments for the next cookie day :).

If you are a regular 3DC reader you must know how we always try to avoid air bubbles, still wondering why?

BOOOOOOOOOM!

Air bubble cookie burst

Air bubble cookie burst

 More food printing experiments for our next printing cookies day.