Like many people, Ella Hawkins turned to baking to cope with the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Defying the bread-making craze that swept social media, the British scholar opted to make decorated biscuits—or cookies, as Americans call them—in conversation with her academic field: design history. The first set she posted on Instagram in 2021 was an homage to William Morris, the nineteenth-century British textile designer. She flavored the dough with orange, cardamom, and vanilla; after baking the biscuits, she hand-piped elaborate floral patterns onto them with various shades of royal icing. Hawkins has used a similar method for crafting the many biscuits that have followed, often inspired by literary subjects that intersect with design: costumes from the historical-fantasy TV drama Outlander, based on the novel series by Diana Gabaldon; objects in the collection of Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, England, where Hawkins was a 2021 artist-in-residence; medieval illuminated manuscripts; Georgian-era bookbinding tools; and more.
Hawkins made the set pictured above to celebrate the release of her book, Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume: ‘Period Dress’ in Twenty-First-Century Performance, published in 2022 by Bloomsbury. (Credit: Ella Hawkins)
Hawkins made the set pictured above to celebrate the release of her book, Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume: ‘Period Dress’ in Twenty-First-Century Performance, published in 2022 by Bloomsbury. Each of the twenty-four biscuits corresponds to a different costume, portrait, or place featured in the volume; a key identifying the origin of each motif in the set can be found on her website. While they may function as visual artworks, Hawkins’s biscuits are primarily culinary creations: “As long as I’ve got a good photograph of the finished set, I’m very happy for the biscuits to be eaten and enjoyed,” she says. But that has not stopped her from publicly displaying her edible wares, as she did last summer at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, where she held a residency and made biscuits responding to the gallery’s “Meat and Potatoes” exhibition. While many subjects appeal to Hawkins as a biscuit artist, she expects books to remain her constant muse: “Literature will always be a big source of inspiration for me,” she says, “particularly because it brings together my academic and artistic interests.”
