Take a finished pastry and walk it backwards, undoing each baking step until only the raw ingredients remain.
You start with a finished baked good and a target raw state. Apply inverse operations to undo the baking process one step at a time, reversing mixes, folds and bakes until the dough matches the target. Fewer steps score higher, so aim for par.
Working backwards from an end state is a genuine discipline. In mathematics it is the inverse problem — recovering the causes from the effects — and in chess it is retrograde analysis, a whole subgenre of problems asking not what happens next but what must have happened before.
The original framing is a kitchen: start with a finished baked good and undo mixes, folds and bakes until the dough matches a target raw state.
Baking is a good disguise for the idea because it is so plainly irreversible in life. That is what makes the puzzle legible — you already know which operations destroy information, so the hard steps are the ones where several forward paths would have produced the same loaf.
Backwards Bakery is an original free browser logic puzzle built on inverse operations and reverse problem-solving, dressed up in a playful kitchen theme. No download needed.