Fixin' Leaks and Leeks

How many scoops can a cookie scooper scoop when the spring-loaded scooper has sprung? None. Not one cooky cookie.

I have broken two cookie scoops within months (days?) of one another, which makes Nate’s late-night cookie baking a bit of a crumble.

Sure, I could let the batter return to room temperature rather than forcing a cookie scoop through the center of rock-hard refrigerated dough. I also could show some restraint, some self-control, and not try to stuff the scooper to capacity, adding an intense amount of pressure to the spring mechanism-gismo. Maybe I could just hold off on baking cookies for a little while.

Or, I could get a new one and try, try again. So, for Valentine’s Day, I bought a new cookie scoop at the grocery store. It’s exactly like the other two I broke, so this one will probably break too—but maybe Nate can be the one to break it. I’ve been having all the fun lately.

Secretly, I think the cookie scoop is just a bit mischievous. It doesn’t want us to use it. It wants us to use our hands and maybe a teaspoon or spoon—and just leave it alone. A cozy kitchen drawer is like a vacation for the cookie scoop, I suppose. After months hanging on a hook in a store, it probably feels luxurious to unclench next to the rolling pin, breathe in any residual cooking wine that may be left in the glass measuring cups.

We didn’t have cookie scoops when I was growing up. We just estimated, and each cookie got increasingly bigger than the next. Also, we’d get tuckered out halfway through and start baking gigantic cookies to finish the batter and get on with the baking and scorching of mouths.

Sure, it would have been nice to have had evenly formed cookies growing up, but that was for people who fancied themselves as efficient robots, and what’s the fun in that?

Later, all the cooking shows came blasting through the TV in the ‘90s and early 2000s (BAM!) with all the fancy gear—and cookie scoops—and suddenly, the dream of evenly formed cookies was not just for robots and celebrity chefs, anymore. I could live that dream, too!

But the dream’s only as good as the person holding the cookie scoop, and the parchment paper in my kitchen is lined with broken scoops and cookies and cookie scoops’ dreams that turn to nightmares.

I promise I’ll be good to this one. I promise I won’t try to fill it with too much batter or crack its cute little face open on a block of super stiff butter cookie dough. Or accidentally drop it down the garbage disposal and break both it and the garbage disposal with just a flip of a switch. Yep, I’m good at making evenly formed promises, but if the cookie scoop has other plans, well, I know where the rest of them live: aisle 16. I mean, what are the odds of a cookie baking baker breaking every cookie scooper scooping up cookies in the cooking section of aisle 16?

Your Turn: What’s a cooking gadget you could actually live without?