Cookies...

I'm a big fan of cookies. If you've seen my belly, you know.

As much of a fan of cookies as I am, I'm not a big fan of cooking cookies. They're a lot of work. You typically start with butter (which is probably why cookies are so good). You can't melt it, though, or the cookies come out awful. (Incidentally, why is awesome so much better than awful? You'd think with less of it it'd be much worse.) It takes a lot of work to mix a square of hard butter with a cup of sugar, doesn't it? (I assume you all keep your butter in the freezer and there's never any out when you decide to make cookies.)

Even after you manage to mix everything together, you have to make an arbitrary amount of dough into a roundish shape, which is hard because the dough sticks to everything it touches. And if you add enough flour so that it doesn't stick, the cookies don't cook up right.

The exception to the rule is sugar cookies. Yeah, there's the rolling them out and cutting them with cookie cutters, but then they're done. There's no guessing about how much dough you need, or wondering how far they'll ooze when they cook. There's no flattening them with a fork. And, if you need to add more flour to keep them from sticking, you can!

There is one thing that drives me nuts with sugar cookies, however: the inefficiency of the cookie cutter shapes. There are circles, hearts are popular, angels, gingerbread men (they make white men with sugar cookies), and all manner of other shapes. You even have holiday shapes like candy canes, santa clauses, mini Jesuses, and stars of David. But you know what all those different shapes mean, right? You have waste!

That's right, waste! You have to scoop up the cookies and transfer them gently to the pan, then gather up all the excess dough, work it back into the borg glob, and re-roll. When you get near the end of the dough you're rolling everything out for just a couple extra cookies, then re-rolling to squeeze out another couple. And, of course, this whole time you're eating little bits of extra. By the end, you've already consumed 5-6 cookies worth (and you can bet that won't show up on your Weight Watchers food log).

So what's the solution? A hexagonal cookie cutter! I'm serious! Think of how much more efficient cookie making would be if you could just use a hexagonal cookie cutter. There's no waste, no re-rolling what you've already rolled, no subconscious eating of dough. It's a perfect solution.