Bakery Story
Through the Mathemalchemy Looking Glass
A deeper incursion in the Tortoise Story
Baker Arnold has just filled a cookie sheet with pi-shaped cookies. He still has plenty of dough and more empty cookie sheets; when they are filled too, he’ll bake a big batch in the big oven, already nice and warm: you can see the coals glow through the furnace grill.
Arnold very much likes this cookie shape – it is designed so that it tiles the plane, so that after punching out the shapes and transferring them to a baking sheet, he has a lot fewer scraps to roll out again.
His assistant Mo[u]se is telling him about other cookie shapes they have designed that have the same property.
Both Arnold and Mo[u]se like geometry and mathematical shapes a lot; you can tell from the decoration of their Bakery.
Yet the rims of the bowls used by Arnold are decorated with an equation, not with geometric motifs – those bowls are a present to our Baker from a very famous cousin, who is fond of this equation.
After finishing the batch of pi-cookies, Arnold will bake a cake using the mold on the Bakery shelf; the shelf also holds a little marzipan train emitting spun-sugar smoke. The cake and the train will be an edible reconstruction of the painting on the wall!
The Bakery is also famous for its mandelbrot cookies, which are biscotti-like confections with almonds mixed into the dough. Mandelbrots feature prominently in the sign of the Bakery, and are always on offer in the Bakery cart, just around the corner.
Read more about the Bakery
