There are so many things you can make with a cookie cutter. Cakes, breads, finger sandwiches, and cookies are the obvious choices, but you can also trace them to make crafts and decorations, give them as gifts, and wear them as jewelry. Okay, you shouldn't wear them as jewelry. Still, here are the eight greatest Halloween cookie cutters we could find!

1. Spiders and spiderweb (above)
2. Rat formerly featured at Sur La Table and Williams Sonoma (discontinued, but available on eBay)
3. Caterpillar
4. Tombstone cutter, also see the hearse and coffin
5. Pink heart because hearts kept coming up in our search and we realized that love is scary
6. These cutters are designed specifically for spooky pancakes!
7. Classy "Cookie Press" cutters make a great gift
8. Witch - we don't know where to get this one, but it's unrivaled in witchy goodness

Spoooookie Cooooookies.

OK, there are still a couple of days to celebrate this holiday week, and it goes along well with National Cookie Day (two days ago) and our Cookie A Day marathon (all this month). Here are some interesting shapes from The Cookie Cutter Shop. I like the martini glass.

Here's a question: what's the oddest cookie cutter you've ever made cookies with? Beyond the usual Christmas shapes, gingerbread men, Halloween pumpkins, and stars?

Chess doesn't have the reputation of being the most exciting game out there, but there are two things that you can introduce to living things up a little. The first is money and the second is food (or possibly alcohol, but we'll stick to food in general). Whether you want to gamble on chess games is entirely up to you, but we rather like the idea of getting food involved by making an edible chess set to play with. This cookie cutter set comes with shapes for all the different pieces, as well as with a square, which you can use to make the 64 tiles that make up the board.

You'll need two different colors of cookie dough to play, and the ideal cookie dough will not spread too much when it is baking. Try a vanilla or butter cookie recipe for the white pieces and a chocolate cutout cookie recipe for the dark pieces. If you like peanut butter, this recipe for two tone star cookies will give you both a light and dark dough to work with.

[via neatorama]

I'm usually on the lookout for new gingerbread cookie cutters around the holidays and have yet to find a set that I like, largely because the gingerbread people turn out too large. I have one cookie cutter that is probably 10 inches long and is accompanied by a matching snowman cutter. Who wants a gingerbread cookie that big - not to mention the fact that it is a pain to bake enormous cookies because of the increased risk of over/underbaking. This year I came across this set of Gingerbread Family Cookie Cutters, which includes six reasonably-sized cutters (gingerbread man, woman , boy, girl, dog and house), all packed in a small house-shaped tin. In addition to not being inconveniently oversized, the cutters provide more options than a singleton gingerbread man cookie cutter would. It's $13 for the whole set.

Besides - baking your own will be far more fun and a lot less expensive than buying the pre-made cookies individually. If you're really not into baking, however, it might be a good idea to opt for some gingerbread cookie ornaments, which will last much longer.