Make Your Own Lantern Cookie Cutters using 3D Printing
What festival would be complete without special foods?
My family learned to make 3D printed cookie cutters using the 3D printing service at Schlow Library
https://www.schlowlibrary.org/about/services/3d-printing-schlow
The Schlow Labs group at the library created a nice video to describe the process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzSJuNoNcyA
Following their process, my son and I searched google images for black and white lantern images that were close to what we wanted, and then used a free sketchpad program to modify the images appropriately to generate the needed png graphic file:
For the narrow arabic-style lantern (fanoos) below that involve adding black lines to ensure that all the textured items were enclosed by a solid border. For the sky lantern we traced a nice looking photo and added the words 'sky' and 'lantern' . For the Chinese New Year lantern we deleted the long tassels. There are many types of festival lanterns; this list has keywords that can help you find images of some interesting types from google searches. Email any suggested additions to Ashley or Doug.
The png file for the fanoos was uploaded into a program called Cookiecad, which readily creates a 3D cookie cutter shape in the type of cutter that you specify. The software permits you to thoroughly inspect the shape from different viewing angles before you save it for printing.
app.cookiecad.com
The free version of the program allows you to make basic one-piece cutters and imprint cutters, but we decided to pay for a 3-month subscription to the full-featured version so we could make 2-piece cutter/imprint pairs. They allow you to pay whatever price you want to pay. After the program creates the cutter/imprint pair you save it as a 3D printable stl file.
The file is then uploaded to Schlow using their 'Start Your Print Job!' button at:
https://www.schlowlibrary.org/about/services/3d-printing-schlow
It takes a few days and costs about $2.50 for each lantern cookie cutter. You pick it up at the library desk upstairs.
My daughter tried out the imprint/cutter pairs with 5 recipes. You want to search for 'stamped cookie recipes.' She ranked the ones she tried from most favorite to least favorite. The basic sugar cookie dough expands a bit more when baked, but still makes reasonable imprints. Nordicware.com and other sources have lots of recipe variations we'd like to try such as peanut butter and chocolate mint.
Chocolate -https://www.nordicware.com/recipes/chocolate-stamped-sugar-cookies-with-variations/
Brown Sugar - https://www.nordicware.com/recipes/stamped-sugar-cookies/
Basic sugar cookie https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020651-basic-sugar-cookies
Lemon cookie = basic sugar cookie + 1tsp lemon extract
White Shortbread Stamped Cookies https://veenaazmanov.com/shortbread-stamped-cookies/
Enjoy!
