2021: a biscuit (cookie) retrospective. 🍪. Thys 🧵 beginneth wyth these illuminated manuscript morsels. All painted by hand and flavoured with orange, cardamom & vanilla. (1/?)

All designs painted onto royal icing by hand using food colouring gels and vodka. The biscuit (cookie) flavour is based on a Victorian recipe for fig pudding. Ingredients include fig, candied peel, almond & sherry.

’Tis the season for a biscuit set inspired by Victorian scrapbooking. 🍪. These festive scraps come from two scrapbooks in the @Powerhouse Collection, both thought to have been compiled by children between 1880 and 1890.

Biscuit (cookie) flavour: Orange, cardamom & vanilla. The design is painted onto royal icing by hand using food colouring gels and vodka. This biscuit was created using the wonderful Special Collections & Archives at @USULibraries.

Centuries ago, many astronomical books included moving parts to help readers interpret the world around them. This biscuit recreates a diagram from Sacrobosco’s ‘De Sphaera’ (c.1550). It could be used to calculate the changing length of daylight hours through the year. 🍪

Happy National Biscuit Day 2024! 🥳.

RT @britishlibrary: Would you dunk our collection in a cuppa? 🍪. Explore highlights from our collection in biscuit form (created by @EllaMc….

RT @V_and_A: ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’ . William Morris was born #OnThis….

There are lots of details of sources & flavours here: You can also find me on Instagram: Or Facebook:

Finally, here's a cookie set that'll always be at the top of my list. It brings together a bunch of different costumes, documents, portraits, and places that I've loved thinking and writing about over the past few years.

Penultimate entry: this one-off biscuit based on a Roman mosaic. I have fond memories of dabbing all those tiny blobs of icing.

I was walking up the stairs one day and the idea of biscuifying illuminated manuscripts suddenly came out out of nowhere. I cancelled the rest of my weekend plans and got to work. (We later ate the biscuits at a family BBQ.)

Ancient Greek pottery sherds!

This set took *forever* to make, but my heart skipped about ten beats when I first saw these medieval tiles on display at the British Museum. One of my all-time favourites.

Here's another old one. I think I'll always love book bindings, early modern frontispieces, and scrawled annotations as much as I did when this set came together.

Old tiles are also an excellent thing. Here are some biscuits inspired by English delftware tiles in the V&A collections. (These ones were especially tasty - they were flavoured with speculaas spices as a nod to delftware's Dutch heritage.)

This set is a relatively recent one. I'd stumbled across photos of stained glass fragments found at Westminster Abbey, and couldn't resist making edible versions. I'm a sucker for medieval styles.

Quite spontaneously, here are some of my favourite biscuit (cookie) sets from the past three years. This set feels to me like summertime. It came together in a whirlwind after a rewatch of 'Emma' (2020). Each biscuit is inspired by a costume featured in the film.

Three years ago - time flies! Still pursuing the academia plan and still making material culture cookies. 🍪.

RT @katephillips29: Fragments of windows, within a window 😍🤩.Bushmead Priory, Bedfordshire.

Here are my source images!. 1. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. 2. CC-BY-NC-ND Image Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 3. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.