Happiness is...

...two-and-a-half-dozen freshly baked cookies.




Or, more precisely, two really big cookies each consisting of fifteen roughly hexagonally-shaped lobes. I wanted to get all the cookies in the oven at once, you see; and we only have two cookie sheets, so they all had to fit; and, well, you see the result.

When I was in college I had a roommate who had been into the martial arts, and he taught me the meanings of various terms: the suffix "-do", for example (as in kendo, aikido, bushido, taekwondo, and judo) means "the way of-" or "the philosophy of-". So, kendo is "the way of the sword", for example. The suffix "-jitsu" means something like "the practice of-" or "the technique of-", so kenjitsu is "the practice of the sword" or "sword technique". These two suffixes are used in a complimentary fashion; there is the way of kendo, and the practice of kenjitsu; there is the way of judo, and the practice of jujitsu, and so forth.

So knowing this, Tonya and I have come up with a term of our own: If you want to get the most out of your cookie-do, little Grasshopper, you must practice your cookie-jitsu.

Judging from the above picture, our cookie-jitsu needs a little more work. Like a half-learned martial art, it gets the job done, if one doesn't mind how it looks.

Like the honeycomb,

Elegant cookie structures;

Need more cookie sheets.