New York Times, Thursday, October 30, 2014

So I like the idea of rebus squares that have a purpose. In this case their purpose is to make a picture! A few thoughts about this puzzle's construction: at 16x16 and with two rebused grid spanners and chopped off corners (so it looked cookie-ish), there were limited options for the grid layout. The result included a tricky center (with a lot of thematic material and many interlocking 6+ letter answers) and four fairly large corners. There's some fill in here that I'll avoid in future puzzles, but I'm happy with how the rebus squares are hidden. As always, there are trade-offs in everything.

I do wish my original clue for 16 A [Thonged throng?] had made the cut, though I suppose it was a bit oblique. Anyway, hope you enjoyed the puzzle. Until next time!

In the print edition (and maybe some other versions) of today's puzzle, the six squares in each corner of the grid, which would usually be black, have been removed instead — to accentuate the cookie's roundness visually. This sort of effect used to be common in grids in crossword magazines, but it's a rarity in newspapers.

Neat idea for a visual puzzle, a representation of a CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE. Nice use of cheater squares in the four corners to make a circle-ish shape out of the normal crossword square. And a fun time searching for those rebus squares, CHIPs dotted around the puzzle. Everyone has their favorite puzzle type, and visual puzzles tend to do it for me. Dare I say... CHIPs ahoy! (groan)

CHOCOLATE (CHIP) COOKIE being 16 letters necessitated expanding the grid past the normal 15x15 shape. I like how the circularity of the cookie is preserved by going up to 16x16, although there is something nice about cookies fresh out of the oven being a bit imperfect, even ovoidal. Going to a 16x16 grid does mean that the revealer has to be at the bottom of the puzzle, with a matching entry at the top. Nice find in (CHIP)PENDALES DANCERS, a snappy phrase in itself.

Visual puzzles are tricky. I find that the ones tickling me most have a visual very closely resembling what it's supposed to be. I had a hitch with this one in that those 1x3 rectangular black bars around the perimeter disrupted the cookie image for me. I doodled around to see if it would be possible to make a cookie image (left) without long "chips" on the perimeter. I'm not sure how hard it would be to fill — probably doable but also somewhat to extremely hard to fill cleanly — so it's hard to say if something like this would fly or not. Those long answers all around the perimeter would make filling very tough, and would likely necessitate fewer CHIPs. David hits the nail on the head — as always, trade-offs.

It might have been nice to get more CHIPs dispersed throughout the puzzle (I'm that guy who "accidentally" spills three times as many chocolate chips into cookie dough), but it's a good balance between theme density and smoothness. The fill was solid, with a good combination of CHIP as a single word as well as part of a longer word. And for those of you solving electronically, take a peek at the grid below — I was surprised at how much clearing out those corners made a difference in terms of cookie-ness. Enjoyable solve.