Cooking is a common experience in preschool classrooms, where teachers provide hands-on opportunities with ingredients in the process of following standard recipes. What sets this story apart is the way that the teacher supports the children in designing their own cookie recipe in an authentic way, using experimentation and manipulation of cookies and baking ingredients without any idea of the outcome. Baking cookies emerged as the result of many experiences in which children constructed ideas about measurement and quantity in the development of their "cookie recipe." Allowing children to mold and bake from their recipe without knowing whether they would resemble real cookies was a risk the teacher took in facilitating baking as a scientific process. The story of a cooking exploration presented in this article focuses on the interplay between the teacher, Ms. Aslinger, and the children in a Reggio-inspired PreK-K classroom (ages 4 to 6). Ms. Aslinger was learning to use the Cycle of Inquiry System (COI) (Broderick and Hong 2011), a six-phase cycle adapted from Reggio-inspired educators (Gandini and Goldhaber 2001) to guide teachers to plan and implement emergent inquiry curriculum (Figure 1). Ms. Aslinger found that immersion into the COI system and committing to the prompts within was eye opening, challenging her to slow down mentally and reflect on the purposes and perspectives of children to pursue complex nuanced study with them. She learned that by attending to children's thinking, she encouraged explorations with materials and ideas in a setting filled with conversation and questioning.