All flavors.

I enjoy attending most (sorry, not you, MLA) academic conferences. While they are on the one hand primarily an opportunity to present one's work to a tired, addled audience of people who themselves have just presented their work to an equally stuporous group in a cramped room down the hall, they are also an opportunity to visit unlikely places with very clever and deranged old friends.

Often these friends will get extremely drunk and become even more entertaining than they are when sober. However, the dazed, glazed condition induced by extended exposure to academic presentations is its own kind of altered state, and so the lunacy generally begins early in the day and goes pleasantly downhill from there.

One October I was in Edmonton on the occasion of just such a conference. It was unseasonably warm, we were told, which means pretty tit-achingly cold, but not so cold that you get frostbite while huddling outside smoking your cigarette. At lunchtime we would even go so far as to wander the streets in search of interesting alternatives to the food court inside the conference building.

My especially good friend F. headed bagelward with a favorite colleague whom I will call the Filter-Free Wunderkind, because he is both of these things. (This story does not begin to illustrate his glorious lack of filter, but believe me, it is there, or rather, not there.) They arrived at some sort of Canadian Bagel Hut, where a young and wholesome Albertan woman asked them what they would like.

"What kinds of bagels do you have?" asked the Filter-Free Wunderkind.

"Oh," she said, "we have all flavors of bagels."

"Really!" said the F-F W immediately. "Do you have OWL flavor? Do you have TAR flavor?"

Oddly, they didn't.

And that is why, when I obtained one of these, the first thing I made with them was some of these:

Which I think turned out quite nicely. I hope F. likes hers.

Comments

[miranda]

I LOVE THESE!!!!

[redfox]

Yay! Thanks, I love them too. It's a fun toy.

They even taste good. This is a note to myself that this recipe works just dandy for roll-and-cut cookies as long as you add an extra half stick of butter.

Any thoughts for other things that would be delightful to read on an elegant biscuit? For that matter, any favorite recipes that would be suitable for cutting and imprinting in this fashion?