William De Morgan was the Arts & Crafts movement’s most brilliant and prolific ceramic artist.

This biscuit (cookie) set is inspired by some of his many tile designs. 🍪

I’m currently on maternity leave. Biscuit-making opportunities are proving hard to come by, but I should have a couple of new sets to share soon.

If you’d like to see more in the meantime:
- ellahawkins.com
- Instagram – @ellamchawk
- Facebook – Ella Makes Cakes

Happy National Biscuit Day 2025! 🍪

I’ll end with some dazzlingly glorious costume design. This summery set pays homage to Alexandra Byrne’s work on the 2020 film adaptation of ‘Emma’.

Almost done! I couldn’t leave out this edible assortment of medieval tiles from the British Museum.

The biscuit recipe was inspired by flavours from the same period: honey, ginger, and clove.

Have you ever had the urge to eat a Roman mosaic? This one (the real one, not the biscuit) was found in London by MOLA archaeologists, and dates from the late 2nd to 3rd century CE.

Things are about to get a bit ancient.

I baked these biscuity sherds on a hemisphere cake tin in an attempt to recreate Ancient Greek pottery fragments in all three dimensions. The originals, dating from c.1600-435 BCE, can be found in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum.

One more bookish set for good measure.

These biscuits are inspired by the weird and wonderful world of medieval illustration.

I always wondered how the gold detailing on book bindings gets added.

One day, I happened upon a photo of all the different book binding tools in the University of Reading's Special Collections conservation workshop. Here are some of them in biscuit form.

Let’s do a bit of literary history next. This set is inspired by early modern books in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Folger Shakespeare Library collections.

Shakespeare’s First Folio makes three biscuity appearances here. Honourable mentions also to Milton and to Beaumont and Fletcher.

Delftware tiles!

There were hundreds of fabulous examples to choose from in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s online catalogue, but I eventually settled on nine.

These 18th-century ships, shepherds, castles, figures, and flowers brought me joy. I hope they’ll do the same for you, too.

Most of my biscuits get eaten, but I hung on to this one.

The flavour is orange, cardamom, and vanilla, and the design was painted by hand onto royal icing using food colouring gels and vodka.

From Arts & Crafts patterns to medieval archaeology.

These biscuits recreate stained glass fragments found a few years ago in the triforium of Westminster Abbey.

Today is National Biscuit Day, and it’s about time that I populated this account with biscuit (cookie) sets from the past few years. Here are some of my favourites. 🧵

First up, a set inspired by the delicious designs of William Morris and John Henry Dearle.

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.

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.

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 Utah State University.

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. 🍪