I have a weakness (OK, I have a lot of weaknesses, but I’m only addressing one here) for kitchen gadgets, and for molded pans and cookie cutters in specific. Williams Sonoma (http://www.williams-sonoma.com/) is among the panderers to said weakness. If I can leave their store for under $100, I feel morally superior and thrifty and all sorts of things. This is why I only shop there when I have either saved up a lot or when I have a really nice royalty check come in.
My daughter convinced me to stop in there last week with her – she wanted to get a salt grinder and some black sea salt. I spent around $75 – not bad according to my usual damage there, but dreadful considering I hadn’t planned on spending a penny.
But there was this marvelous acorn cakelette mold with 18 small acorns on it shaped like an acorn. You could serve the little cakes as is, or put them together to make 9 3-D small acorn cakes. (I can’t find a link to it anywhere on line, so I EDITED TO SAY: so I took pictures, see below). And with Talk Like a Pirate Day coming up, I had to get this darling Nordic Ware 3-D pirate ship cake mold (http://tinyurl.com/5mcc77).
I have a large collection of cookie cutters, and I’m not at a point in my cookie cutter collection that finding new and interesting shapes is difficult. So, now I’ve started collecting shaped baking pans. What really excites me about some of the shaped baking pans is that I can use them to make highly unusual meat and vegetable pies. Imagine that pirate ship pan lined with a sturdy yet still flakey pie crust and filled with a nice lovely salmon koulibiaca filling, baked, inverted onto a “Sargasso Sea” of spinach, with sails made of pretzel rods and pastry sheets.
Ebonypearl 
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