I'm here via the Thinky Awards - congratulations on being a finalist in two categories! (I think it would have also been a great candidate in Best Cursed Game :D ) I loved it, thank you so much! I'm running around recommending it to people.
I played the advanced version. I compared the two versions while solving the very last puzzle and realized that I already got the rules from page 0. I'm not sure how different the experience would have been, but I enjoyed my playthrough and I was glad I chose this version.
Here are the places I got stuck:
1. The first puzzle. After I got the theme, I realized that I just didn't know the names of that many cookies in English. I noticed it was a problem when I found "lady" and couldn't think of a single cookie with "lady" in its name. I ended up looking at a "List of cookies" page on some baking website and that helped. (I have been living in the US for over a decade at this point, but I'm allergic to multiple things that often go into cookies... I hadn't realized how much this affected my vocabulary, lol!)
2. Why does "zodiac" appear twice?!? I eventually got it...
3. The very last puzzle - I got the entire message, including the part in the individual letters, but somehow thought the bottom line was covering a different expression! I gave up, went to sleep, and realized right away the next morning from the letter shapes showing under the bottom line that it was the same message.
I'm not sure what my order of solving was, because I also worked on some of the puzzles in parallel. The last few were 11, 1, 12. I guessed the themes of most of them and then I only tried to add them into 11 after that. (Except "timepiece".)
Also, I used xournal - it is quite fast for me (I use it for taking notes if a lot of graphs/drawings are involved) so maybe it depends on the platform? This was the Linux version.
Thank you again for the great game!