them's crossing words

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Twice-Baked Bread

by Amie Walker & Shannon Rapp

A lovely, bite-sized grid. The theme is an apt pair with SWEETROLL and SOURDOUGH, the two sweet/sour halves of "Twice-Baked Bread." I assume that the twice-baked portion of the title also refers to the joint constructors, since none of SOURDOUGH, Bear claw, or Chelsea bun are twice-baked.

Grids that are this easy are less puzzling and more therapeutic. Kick your feet up and enjoy the ride. I especially enjoyed "Part of the mouth where peanut butter gets stuck" (ROOF). It sets a homely mood for the rest of the solve.

I'm a little disappointed at the lack of a Skyrim reference for SWEETROLL, shoutout to my first post "khajiit has wares, if you have coin." Speaking of shoutouts, I have to dig the inclusion of SKA in the lower-left corner. Did you know ska predates reggae[1]?

As a fledgling constructor, I find it interesting how easy it is to land on an X-shaped grid when building a Midi. The X shape comes from a desire to split the grid into four quadrants, separating the themers while keeping the rest of the fill attainable. Mad respect to constructors who can stack up multiple grid-length words, like "Are you picking up what I'm putting down?"

One quick meta note: when I started this blog I included a "days since last Taylor Swift reference" counter on the homepage because of how often Swift references made their way into Puzzmo crosswords. Now that it's been over three weeks since the last reference (which has got to be some kind of record) I'm starting to think I need to extend the definition to include Beyoncé, whom I swear we've seen pop up at least six times in the last two weeks[2] (this grid included).

  1. Ska fans are required to bring this fact up every time ska is mentioned. ↩︎

  2. I checked the tapes on this one, there's only been two references in the last two weeks. ↩︎

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