Henry Quach

Background

I personally love tessellations and hope to someday make tessellated cookie patterns. As my first step towards this, I've made the most mathematically simple ones - just of 4x4 squares at 10mm pitch :)

Method

Dough Strip Preparation: The technique is not so hard - you just need good rulers and a pastry cutter. For the recipe, it's basically a shortbread dough (I use Sally's Recipe but substitute in two tablespoons of espresso powder or culinary matcha powder, and halve the sugar). The butter needs to be creamed very well in order to be soft though. Then comes a huge waiting game to flatten the dough to ~10 mm height, cut into 10 mm-wide strips, and to array the strip in a 'tuple style'.

Volumetric Chessboard Pattern: One simply must slice cross sections of the tuple-bar. It can take a lot of waiting between stacked layers, especially if you are a baker with warmer hands. I find that you must array the pieces and squeeze to leave no gaps. Gaps between the strips end up becoming weak points or non-uniform in the final slices.

Aesthetic Pre-Bake Pictures: Like with pie and tart crusts, the pre-baked array of goods is SO aesthetically pleasing - I took many opportunities to tile them and get the shots I wanted with my Nikon ZF.

In-the-Oven Recipe calls for 10-12 minutes, but I just waited until the edges were golden brown.

Gorgeous Post-Bake Results

Cookie Cutters with excess caffeinated dough :)