What is this tool?

August 8, 2005 12:16 PM

What is this? (Closeup of the business end here.) It's ostensibly a kitchen utensil, or at least the person I'm asking this for thinks it's a kitchen utensil.
posted by mendel to Technology (12 answers total)

Can you give us a clue as to the scale?
posted by raedyn at 12:41 PM on August 8, 2005

It looks sharp at the end. Could it be to slice something sticky like cheese which is then peeled off of the blade by squeezing the arms together?
posted by caddis at 12:42 PM on August 8, 2005

Response by poster: It's handheld-size, and it's completely dull all around.
posted by mendel at 12:46 PM on August 8, 2005

Best answer: It's for portioning out cookie dough onto a cookie sheet. One scoops up the batter and squeezes the handle to the dough plops onto the cookie sheet. It's designed to be easier to use than two spoons for the same task. Let me see if I can find some links.
posted by stet at 12:49 PM on August 8, 2005

Best answer: From what stet said, I found a newgroups post on it. Still haven't found one for sale or what the "proper" name would be.
posted by smackfu at 1:06 PM on August 8, 2005

stet's got it, used to use mom's quite a bit, though I too don't know a proper name for it.
posted by attercoppe at 1:09 PM on August 8, 2005

Best answer: It's called a cookie dropper. It's funny how the simplest names are the hardest.

Also, looking for this tool has made me just love clustering search engines.
posted by stet at 1:15 PM on August 8, 2005

Response by poster: Y'all rock.
posted by mendel at 1:19 PM on August 8, 2005

FYI, despite the much slower response, Cook's Illustrated Magazine is brilliant at answering queries like this.
posted by matildaben at 2:59 PM on August 8, 2005

stet - didn't understand your last post.
posted by Silky Slim at 5:46 PM on August 8, 2005

"Cookie dropper" is the name of the tool and the search engine I linked to clusters results by topic. The reason the latter is a big deal is because of synonymy, which is the official library science way of saying multiple concepts with the same name.

Compare the Google result set for "cookie" with the Clusty results for the same query. In the Google result set, the various definitions for cookie are all mixed-up in the same result set. Clusty attempts to sort the results into "Cookie--web browsing" "Cookie--baked good" and so forth. It's not perfect, but it represents a huge improvement over the Google way of doing things (in my opinion at any rate).

Robocop is Bleeding addressed a similar problem with Ask.Me tags in this ghostly response.
posted by stet at 5:56 PM on August 8, 2005

How did you use the clustered search engine to find it though? Did you manage to guess the name?
posted by smackfu at 8:08 AM on August 9, 2005