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Show HN: Cookie Recipe Generator
- dazsnow 6y agoThis was a Covid-19 side project to learn Svelte and Sapper. Customize exactly how you want your cookies to turn out and it will generate the perfect recipe for your perfect cookie. Would really like everyone's feedback!
- jonplackett 6y agoHow did you work our all these different potential recipes and what their characteristics would be?
- js2 6y agoThis excellent article explains how varying ingredients affects the outcome of the baked cookie: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best...
- jonplackett 6y agoSerious Eats is the best!
- jonplackett 6y agoThat’s a lot of information to incorporate though. Well done!
- em-bee 6y agothe site is missing a cookie warning ;-)
- kristopolous 6y agoYou have unobtrusive interstitial advertising opportunities here. If the traffic proves stable, I'd consider it. Think of it as a way to recommend brands you like
- danaris 6y agoOne important thing that's missing is an indication of what scale your oven temperature is at. I'm guessing Celsius, given what numbers I'm getting out of it, but it would really be helpful to specify clearly.
- schwartzworld 6y agoI'm a little unclear about how the eggs are measured. Most recipes I've seen specify a quantity of eggs, (i.e. one large egg). Do people actually get out the scale and tune eggs down to the gram?
- perl4ever 6y agoI sometimes choose a number of eggs and scale everything else accordingly.
- ksaj 6y agoI like how it's really only one kind of cookie, but you can dial up/down various facets of what it means to be a cookie, resulting in completely different treats. One would probably learn a lot about cookie baking by dialing up variations and trying them each out. BTW: you get really fun results when trying to make 1 cookie. I'm not sure I have a teaspoon small enough for that.
- dazsnow 6y agoyeah... try measuring out a tiny fraction of an egg... not easy. When I was experimenting with small batches I used a syringe to measure out small amounts of beaten egg!
- ksaj 6y agoIf you made and compiled videos of the steps you took along the way, especially clips of those measuring experiments, it would be an easy YouTube hit. And your site would get a heck of a lot of traffic. IANTFB (I am not the Fine Brothers)
- mantap 6y agoIt's probably easier and less messy to measure the egg by weight, that's how pastry chefs do it. Apparently eggs are pretty close to water in density so the conversion should be trivial.
- lolcat5e 6y agoWould powdered egg work? I've not used it myself. Also - I would so like this site for brownies :-)
- kinghtown 6y agoOne egg is about 50g plus or minus. If a recipe calls for one egg to make 12 cookies then some basic algebra can get you to a single cookie. The real problem with testing a single cookie is creaming a tiny amount of sugar and butter. Even if your ratios are accurate the preparation will be somewhat different and texture will be affected. But small batch testing is the way to go to dial in ingredients for ideal cost and flavour.
- lala26in 6y agolol
- cbsks 6y agoI am definitely going to try this! Is there a link I can save/share with my exact recipe?
- dazsnow 6y agoNot yet, that's on the todo list. It does save any changes to local storage so when you come back next time it will remember the recipe.
- cbsks 6y agoHmmm... for some reason when I move a slider sometimes other ones will move. Is that expected? I’m on iOS Safari.
- dazsnow 6y agoYeah it's a bit janky right now... it's because some properties change ingredients which impact other properties... for example if you want a lighter color then the brown/white sugar ratio might change, which also changes the the texture and thickness.
- jzwinck 6y agoI was able to understand this, but then I found that some sliders make other sliders move farther than necessary. I even found a case where grabbing a slider to move it but putting it back to the original position before releasing the mouse button would change other sliders (surely that means either the original positions were inviable or the changes were unnecessary). UX wise, it would be far easier to understand if the other sliders responded instantly so that I could see as I drag one slider how much it impacts the others, without having to release the mouse at each step to find this out.
- rosstex 6y agoI really want to know the combinatorics of this.... super cool!
- mellavora 6y agocombinatorics gets tricky when values can be continuous ...
- rosstex 6y agoSurely this isn't purely continuous... the steps change dramatically from partial changes to one slider. There must be a number of ranges that define the steps and continuous values within thoes ranges, no? I want to know the number of unique sets of steps/ingredients.
- devwastaken 6y agoWhere does the recipe come from? The 150-160f bake temperature seems wrong, eggs have to be internal temp of about 160 themselves, does that 12 minutes fully heat saturate it? I'm going to try baking these tomorrow, would be cool if cup-measiremrnts mattered more than how many cookies come out. That way I don't have to do all the calculation and figure out the exact number of cookies Id need to get nice rounded numbers.
- ethhics 6y agoGiven the measurements in grams, I’d assume the temperature is Celsius.
- ars 6y agoI wouldn't. One recipe has a temperature of 250 which seems pretty hot if it's C. Also they are using teaspoons. But 160 is way low if it's F, so ???? I think the creator needs to step in and let us know LOL
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dazsnow 6y agoAll units are in standard metric units because it's more precise / easier to measure / more useful for the majority of people. I'll consider adding a toggle for American units later. 250 is indeed very hot, but sometimes that might the kind of temperature you need - it's the upper limit of most domestic ovens. Some measurements are in teaspoons just because that's what most of the recipes I was basing this on were using, and precision isn't really so important for those ingredients, but yeah, the inconsistency is annoying. Will consider changing that to grams later.
- kijin 6y agoA short time at 250C will make for extra crispy cookies, but the dough will have to be thin or the outside will be charred black before the inside is cooked. It takes trial and error to find the right balance. :) A metric teaspoon is 5ml and a metric tablespoon is 15ml. They're perfectly acceptable units, not to mention convenient. Would you rather use 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda or measure 2.5 grams on a kitchen scale? I live in a fully metric country but whenever I need to use a recipe written in grams, I immediately convert them to ts/TS/cups and never look at the gram figure again.
- ars 6y agoInteresting combination of metric and imperial :) Weights and lengths in metric, volumes and temperatures in imperial (or US customary, I can't tell which). And time in Babylonian. Edit: Actually I can't tell if temperature is F or C.
- azhenley 6y agoThis is absolutely awesome and potentially very useful. I know the other commenters are giving you plenty of TODOs, but what I think could make this shine: explanations (like a ? by each dial) that give some details by the property (what is smooth vs craggy?) and how extreme the spectrum goes (is extremely soft just warmed cookie dough?). Photo examples could help too! Also, generating a deterministic name based on the inputs could help people share or differentiate recipes, more so than by unlabeled values. Fun project, good job.
- dazsnow 6y agoThanks, great suggestions!
- jonplackett 6y agoWhat I thought you were going to say was an explanation of how each ingredient affects the characteristics of the cookie. Eg you could have the nice deterministic name like you say, but also something like “with high flour to sugar ratio for softness” or whatever the actual truth of the matter is
- the_pwner224 6y agoIt would be nice if you could create a sharable link to share your specific recipe. You could encode it in the URL like thecookie.website/?q=20&lightness=80&chewiness=80&... - or use a reversible hash type function to get thecookie.website/2fa389dc. Then add a button to show the link & copy it to the clipboard, and maybe also make the URL change when dragging the sliders.
- baddox 6y agoI did something similar with a recent useless Saturday toy project, if the source code helps anyone. https://17dollarphone.com/ https://17dollarphone.com/ https://github.com/baddox/17dollarphone https://github.com/baddox/17dollarphone
- dazsnow 6y agothanks!
- captbaritone 6y agoI clicked through to your site and played with it a bit. Nice idea, and well executed! Then I hit back to come back to HN... seventeen clicks later, I’m back. Might be nice to update the URL without adding a history entry.
- baddox 6y agoHa yeah, very good point. I thought it was neat to have the entire state of the app in the URL and use the back button to demonstrate that, but yes, I should probably be replacing history instead of pushing.
- smichel17 6y agoSuggestion: Push once after every complete phone, but replace after an intermediate state. That way the back button goes through a list of complete combinations you tried, without forcing you to walk back individual steps.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- surround 6y agoI’m surprised to learn how much effort it takes to make good cookies. One of my selections on this website required a preparation time of two and a half hours. I’ve always just thrown ingredients into a mixing bowl.
- kijin 6y agoThe prep time doesn't make sense. 30 minutes in the refrigerator and 10-15 minutes in the oven are totally understandable, but none of the other steps would take 1.5 hours combined. Maybe the website just assigns a minute value to each task and adds them all up, which is not realistic. Recipes written by experienced cooks often parallelize 2-3 tasks. For example, you can preheat the oven while boiling the pasta while you're making the sauce. This not only saves time but is actually essential to the recipe. If you try to execute all three tasks in serial, either the pasta or the sauce will be in a less than ideal condition.
- lifekaizen 6y agolove the idea, how many cookies have you done with it? I got `About 25 hours, 32 minutes preparation time`
- zakki 6y ago1 cookie with 25H 45M preparation time
- maddyboo 6y agoYou should offer an enterprise plan which increases the limit on the number of cookies beyond 1000.
- thepratt 6y agoIt's great that mostly everything is in grams, baking should be precise. It's hard when you read a recipie that uses cups without knowing the origin, as US vs not cups are different sizes (200mL vs 250mL). It would be nice if all measurements were in grams, baking soda and water included.
- matonias 6y ago"Donate $5 for a coffee with my cookie" Since when does coffee cost $5?
- hazbo 6y agohttps://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/starbucks-prices/ https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/starbucks-prices/
- dazsnow 6y agoWhen you live in Singapore :p
- kseistrup 6y agoVisit Denmark. You'll be surprised what they charge for coffee here. The other day I bought two café cortado and I had to shell out $13.
- gitgud 6y agoVery cool! Also, this website would suit GDPR compliance perfectly. You need a popup with one option: "I'm okay with cookies!"
- franky47 6y agoInterestingly, this website does use cookies (the digital ones) but fails to report them. For example, Stripe is loaded early on and uses tracking cookies, which are not necessary until a visitor decides to donate.
- capableweb 6y ago> which are not necessary until a visitor decides to donate While true and I agree, Stripe argues that their anti-fraud system is helped if you load the JS code as early as possible, so assuming they are doing bunch of tracking in order to identify fraud when they finally go to the payment screen.
- franky47 6y agoIt may do that, but the fact remains that it uses cookies to do so, which European users have a right to object to under GDPR.
- mabcat 6y agoResults of our User Acceptance Testing: https://imgur.com/Iwjwik2 https://imgur.com/Iwjwik2 Some errors in the testing framework were identified and will be rectified in subsequent test suite runs
- thih9 6y agoFeature request: I'd love to see it work both ways, i.e. change the amount of an ingredient and see how it affects the end result.
- dolmen 6y agoUse cases: - missing ingredients - want low sugar
- kennydude 6y agoLooks really useful, except for people especially in England, Corn Syrup isn't a common ingredient :(
- globular-toast 6y agoCorn syrup isn't a useful ingredient anyway. It only exists in the US due to corn subsidies. I would be more concerned about the difference in flour between UK and US. That would change a "perfect" recipe significantly.
- js2 6y ago> Incidentally, if you want the absolute chewiest, most uniformly textured cookies, try replacing some of the white sugar with corn syrup, a sugar that is even more hygroscopic. Corn syrup is so darn powerful, in fact, that even a small amount of it will completely alter the texture of your cookie. In the cookies above, the batch on the left was made with 5 ounces each of white and brown sugar. The batch on the right was made with 5 ounces of brown sugar, 4 ounces of white sugar, and 1 ounce of corn syrup. A substitution of only 10%. https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best...
- globular-toast 6y agoThat sounds like what we would call glucose syrup which is readily available in Europe. I was thinking of high-fructose corn syrup.
- js2 6y agoYes, that's correct. Granulated sugar (sucrose) is fructose and glucose. Corn syrup is glucose syrup made from corn. HFCS is made to simulate sucrose by adding fructose to corn syrup. In the US we like to market things based on what they don't contain (unsalted butter, unsmoked provolone, etc), so glucose syrup is sold as as "0g High Fructose Corn Syrup, aka light corn syrup with _real_ vanilla": https://www.karosyrup.com/products.html https://www.karosyrup.com/products.html
- readme 6y agoI can't find where to pay? I selected all the cookie preferences I wanted. How do I finish the transaction and get the cookies delivered?
- js2 6y agoAh, that's a different web site: https://insomniacookies.com/ https://insomniacookies.com/
- js2 6y agoIt seems like a lot of commenters here may have missed the fact that the site is based on this Serious Eats article: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best...
- xori 6y agoI love it, I'm making cookies tonight. Some humble suggestions. - might be best to include the C as units for temp - somehow allow scaling recipe to whatever my eggs actually weigh, (I know I can estimate manually bumping the output up and down, but it'd be nice to do exact calculations) - generate cookie previews :P
- relbeek2 6y agomoved all sliders to the right, now it will take 25 hours to cook, might be a bug, or maybe its because i like my cookies, dense, chewy, and crunchy
- dazsnow 6y agoProbably factoring in 24 hours of refrigeration
- dazsnow 6y agoAdded a switch for American units
- klyrs 6y agoThanks! I'm curious what the role of white vs brown sugar is in your model. Personally I've taken to using brown sugar in place of white because I like the molasses flavor better...
- dazsnow 6y agoThe type of sugar actually has quite an impact, other than just the color and flavor. Brown sugar results in taller and softer cookies because it's slightly acidic and so reacts with the baking soda. White sugar causes cookies to spread more and become crunchier.