What Shape Is This Cookie Cutter? No Guess Is Half-Baked.

During last year’s holiday season, people started popping into a baking forum on Reddit with two million members to share a photo and ask a burning question: What on earth is this cookie cutter supposed to be?

The earnest answers often helped clear up the bakers’ confusion. Quickly, however, the posts began surfacing so often that one member created a subreddit dedicated to untangling such cookie-cutter mysteries.

The forum on Reddit is called r/WhatIsMyCookieCutter, and its popularity — membership surged this fall to more than 250,000 people — says something about baking. Without packaging or instructions, the shape of a cookie cutter picked up at a secondhand store or rescued from the recesses of a silverware drawer can be hard to interpret. Is it meant to be a reindeer? A dinosaur? The state of Wyoming?

On r/WhatIsMyCookieCutter, there are no wrong answers. As more members arrived, the group evolved into a self-contained world of inside jokes and running gags. Others respond to queries by uploading renderings of what a cookie cutter might be, often using a drawing and painting app like Procreate to sketch out their whimsical and colorful suggestions.