2014 has been a crazy and amazing year. I got an amazing new job, attended multiple math art conferences in Asia, and made all kinds of fun things.
I thought I would end 11111011110* with an homage to my first post of the year on shortbraid and other geometric cookies, by making a regular polyhedron out of gingerbread and chocolate ‘glue’.
The dodecahedron** is a particularly nice shape to close the year with because it has 12 faces – one per month!*** If you want a fun mathematical New Year project, you can make yourself a dodecahedron calendar.
I considered doing a corresponding month by month round-up of my favorite posts, but I apparently didn’t bother to make a post last January. Instead, I leave you with my delicious and oddly healthy gingerbread recipe for anyone interested in making their own geometric cookies.
3 oz. melted coconut oil
1/2 cup molasses
1 tsp. baking soda mixed with 1 Tbsp. hot water
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp. ground ginger
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
other appropriate spices if you like
pinch salt
1/2 cup ginger chips/chopped candied ginger (optional)
- Mix liquid ingredients and dry ingredients (except ginger chips) separately, combine. I use a Kitchenaid mixer for this.
- Mix ginger chips into dough.
- Shape dough into a log, wrap in plastic wrap and stick in the freezer some time that is at least long enough to firm up, but could approach indefinitely
- Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit
- If you just want circles, slice dough as thin as possible and set pieces on cookie sheet (no need to grease)
- If you want to make other shapes, let dough warm up a bit, then roll it out as thinly as possible and cut out your shapes
- Bake for ~10 minutes, let cookies cool before starting any cookie geometry construction
Finally, gingerbunny ears!****
* I’m unreasonably excited that 2015 will be a palindrome in binary.
** It’s also my favorite platonic solid.
*** Or, as in a recent Vi / eleVR / everyone project, the same number of tones on the scale and days of Christmas…
**** Yes, as you can see in the background, my house is kind of overflowing with random geometric constructions.
