SANTA DOESN’T JUST LIKE ANY COOKIE! Read More to Find Out How to Get on Santa's Good Side

Last year, around this time, I wrote a blog about spices that define the winter season. Those spices included nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves, which you can go back and read here. This year, to bring out that Christmas spirit inside of everyone, I would like to talk about Santa Claus. Now, I know there are a plethora of Christmas treats out there that you will be making, but for the big man flying through the skies, there is one treat that stands head and shoulders above all else. I’m talking, of course, about cookies. However, with the never-ending list of cookies the big question becomes: which one are you making for Santa? With this blog, I might be able to provide you with a little bit of guidance. Recently, I caught up with Santa over coffee and he mentioned to me that while he does appreciate all the cookies you leave for him, he does have a favourite… Santa, being all jolly and such, was gracious enough to allow me to sample his favourite cookie. He handed me ~200 mg of this cookie to taste, before promptly flying away on his reindeer. At this point, my curiosity kicked in. Instead of tasting it to find out the identity of this cookie, why not analyze it with NMR? I thought, maybe there will be some hints lying underneath the spectral tree this season!

In this blog, I decided to do two extractions with the remnants of Santa’s cookie: one in deuterated water (D₂O) and one in deuterated chloroform (CDCl₃). These spectra were used in comparing the characteristic flavour profiles I chose and Santa’s cookie, to determine which flavour’s spectra would be comparable to the cookie. These extracts of this unknown cookie are shown in Figure 1, where the ¹H spectrum of the D₂O extract is on the left and CDCl₃ extract on the right.

Figure 1. ¹H (60.7 MHz) NMR spectrum of Santa’s cookie in D₂O (left) and in CDCl₃ (right).

Unfortunately, there is not much that stands out in these two ¹H spectra at surface level. In the D₂O extract, the main characteristic peak would be the doublet at 5.52 ppm and 5.47 ppm, which is related to the glycosidic proton in sucrose. Unfortunately, there is sugar in almost every cookie, so for this blog, this might not be entirely useful. If you do want to take a deeper dive into the world of sugars, we have a few interesting blogs on this topic that you can view here and here. The ¹H spectrum of the CDCl₃ extract is a little more interesting and helpful for this specific study. At first glance, the spectrum is quite daunting, however, as we have analyzed plenty of oils before, we are able to assign certain types of protons to specific regions in the spectrum. If you would like to see how I was able to assign these regions, we have a spectrum of different edible oils here and an application note about the adulteration of olive oil with soybean oil here! Anyways, in this chloroform extract, we observe 6 distinct regions that are common to edible oils. These regions are presented in Figure 2, which depicts which type of protons are associated with each region.

Figure 2. ¹H (60.7 MHz) NMR of Santa’s cookie with general edible oil-related regions labelled.

With the aid of those previous studies done by my colleagues, I was able to discern most of the regions in the spectrum, however, there were still some peaks that I could not identify. This is where those characteristic flavour profiles I selected came into play. I decided to analyze key components of popular Christmas treats that are left out for Santa to indulge, which include: ginger for ginger cookies, cinnamon for cinnamon cookies, peanut oil for peanut butter cookies, and rum for rum bites (in case Santa has a more adult flavour palate). For the cases of ginger, cinnamon, and peanut oil, I decided to analyze these in CDCl₃ (for solubility reasons), but for the sample of rum, I did my analysis in D₂O as it was not miscible with CDCl₃. In determining the flavour of Santa’s unknown cookie, I stacked each flavour profile with the appropriate cookie extract. Figure 3 shows the stacked spectra of rum in D₂O with the D₂O extract of Santa’s cookie on the left as well as the stacked spectra of ginger, cinnamon, and peanut oil in CDCl₃ with the CDCl₃ extract of Santa’s cookie on the right.

Figure 3. ¹H (60.7 MHz) stacked NMR spectrum of D₂O extracts (left) and CDCl₃ extracts (right).

As we would expect, for the stacked spectrum of D₂O extracts, the spectrum of rum primarily indicates the presence of ethanol with the quartet from 3.51 ppm to 3.86 ppm and the triplet from 1.10 ppm to 1.33 ppm. Unfortunately, from this stacked plot, rum does not seem to be an essential flavour in Santa’s favourite cookie.

With a quick comparison of the stacked spectrum of CDCl₃ exctracts, the spectrum of Santa’s cookie looks almost identical to the spectrum of peanut oil, however, as I alluded to earlier, these peaks are also generally found in edible oils. Of course, we cannot completely rule out peanut butter cookies from being Santa’s favourite cookie, but if we take a deeper dive into the spectrum of Santa’s cookie, there are some characteristic peaks that will give us more valuable clues. First off, we observe two peaks at 2.78 ppm and 2.84 ppm in the unknown cookie, where we observe similar resonances in both the spectra of ginger and peanut oil. Secondly, there is a peak at 3.87 ppm, which we observe prominently in ginger and slightly in cinnamon (but not in peanut oil). The last set of peaks to focus our attention on are at 6.70 ppm, 6.77 ppm, and 7.08 ppm. From looking at the dispersion and shape of these peaks, they closely line up with the spectrum of ginger. Putting these clues together, there is no doubt that there are edible oils in Santa’s cookie, but from my deduction, I do not think peanut butter is the characteristic flavour of Santa’s cookie. This season, it seems that Santa’s favourite cookie would be the ginger cookie, having the most obvious peaks at 3.87 ppm, 6.70 ppm, 6.77 ppm, and 7.08 ppm.

With that mystery solved, I hope you all enjoyed my journey in determining what Santa’s favourite cookie was using benchtop NMR. If you enjoyed this blog, I recently did a similar blog about the cinnamon world that you should check out here! As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us and from our Nanalysis family to yours, we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!