The BIG Oven

One of the first questions we're asked about the World's Biggest Cookie is "How'd You Bake THAT?" Well, it wasn't easy! From the day we set our goal for 100 ft, we began tossing ideas around. The Guinness rules made it a true challenge: The cookie had to be baked all at once instead of baked in sections and pieced together. We came up with many hair-brained schemes including building half of a geodesic dome or creating a record-player style oven that would spin while an infrared heater slowly cooked it section by section. It wasn't long before we sought expert consultation, and we found it just down the road at a corporation that makes ceramics for high-powered ovens. Well-versed with the inner workings of extremely large ovens, these guys quickly created a design for a structureless oven made from materials you could purchase at your local hardware store!

The concept was very simple... We would create a layered base made with gravel, pearlite (the white stuff in potting soil), and aluminum sheets on top to serve as a pan. This combination shielded the cookie from the cool ground temperatures of May. We would then cover the oven with layers of polyester film (the material helium balloons are made of) to keep the heat trapped inside. Finally, we surrounded the pan with over 20 heaters which, together, were capable of raising the oven temperature to well over 350 degrees!

While it sounds simple enough, it took us over 6 months of troubleshooting our 10 ft. test oven to discover the perfect levels of heat and circulation through the polyester film. On top of that, we also had to develop a super special Chocobilly recipe that would bake faster under the odd conditions inside our BIG oven.

After all testing was complete, we began mixing the 40,000 lbs. of chocolate chip cookie dough required to bake the World's Biggest Cookie. We mixed all of the dough in 80 pound batches and then sent it over to our Super Duper Dough Extruder (see photo gallery) to have it expelled in 1/2" thick slabs of dough measuring about 1 square foot in area. These slabs were then stacked on top of each other in boxes, placed on a pallet and loaded into a huge freezer to await the big day.