Solution to Bake Off
The instructions comprise a very detailed recipe for sugar cookies baked from scratch (to be shaped like the team’s emoji). The “simplified” recipe is:
| Ingredients | Instructions |
|---|---|
|
1 stick butter ½ cup sugar 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 tsp baking powder ⅛ tsp salt 240 g flour |
|
Most of the steps in the recipe go into producing the ingredients from their barest components. Here is a rough breakdown of the steps.
| Steps | Summary of steps | End product |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Preheat your oven. | |
| 2–4 | Plant sugarcane. | Sugar |
| 5–9 | Plant (winter) wheat. | Flour |
| 10–14 | Make vanilla extract. | Vanilla |
| 15–18 | Get a cow. | Butter |
| 19–21 | Harvest wheat. | Flour |
| 22–24 | Start raising chickens. | Egg |
| 25–32 | Harvest sodium carbonate ore and refine it into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Add it to the small bowl. | Baking powder |
| 33–36 | Winnow the wheat and grind it into flour. | Flour |
| 37–43 | Dry out some seawater to make salt, and combine it with the flour in the medium bowl. | Salt |
| 44–55 | Harvest the sugarcane and refine it into sugar crystals | Sugar |
| 55–57 | Acquire corn and set it out to dry. | Baking powder |
| 58–65 | Milk the cow and churn it into butter. Note step 60 also tells us to make the final product look like the team emoji. | Butter |
| 66–68 | Cream the butter and the sugar in the large bowl. Add vanilla extract. | |
| 69–71 | Harvest an egg from your chicken coop. Consider using the extra eggs to make royal icing. | Egg |
| 72–73 | Add an egg to the large bowl and mix the wet ingredients. | |
| 74–82 | Refine cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) from a wine barrel and add it to the small bowl. | Baking powder |
| 83–93 | Soak the corn kernels and then separate the starch from the protein. Then dry out the starch and add it to the small bowl. | Baking powder |
| 94–95 | Add the baking powder to the other dry ingredients, and then mix them and add to the wet ingredients. | |
| 96 | Form the cookies in the shape of your team emoji. | |
| 97 | Bake the cookies. | |
| 98 | Ice the cookies. |
Calculations of the ingredient amounts that aren’t given:
| Ingredient | Calculation |
|---|---|
| Butter | ½ gal milk = ⅙ to ¼ lb butter, a stick of butter weighs ¼ lb |
| Flour | 240 g of wheat berries yields 240 g of flour (or a little less) |
| Salt | Density of seawater = 1.027 g/ml Density of table salt = approximately 1.4 g/ml Fraction of mass of seawater that is salt = 0.035 Initial seawater = 2 tbsp 2 tbsp * 0.035 * (1.027/1.4) = 0.05 tbsp ≈ ⅛ tsp. |
| Baking powder | 1/2 tsp cream of tartar + 1/4 tsp baking soda + 1/4 tsp (approx.) cornstarch = 1 tsp baking powder. |
The last step of the recipe asks us to call HQ once our bake is ready. During the hunt, teams that did this were asked to show off their cookies and then asked to identify the emoji from other teams’ cookies in the gallery. After completing this task, teams were given the answer, CILANTRO.