Did you ever wonder how they make those pillsbury cookie dough rolls with the intricate faces inside them? Look here and notice the intricate design they have somehow injected into their cookie rolls? If you examine the roll closely there is no seam between the normal dough and the colored shape, but somehow they get that inside the roll. I emailed them asking them how they do it and they told me it was “doughboy magic”.
Solution
don’t know if this is right or not, but it sounds pretty darn close to the best idea I’ve heard yet.
From Brad Siemssen:
”I assume these are made the same way designs are put in the center of taffy candies. The designs are made by taking advantage of the fact that the dough is soft and pliable.
They take the dough and make the design at a large diameter and thickness. The diameter could a foot or more. At this scale the design does not have to be very precise. Extrusion methods like the playdough presses would work.
They then take the giant dough cylinder with the rough design and then roll it into a “snake” just like kids do with balls of playdoh. As the “snake” gets longer the design in the center gets uniformly smaller. The “snake” is then cut into pieces and put in packaging.
To get a more precise designs simply requires increasing the starting diameter. The engineering difficulty then lies in rolling the snake out.
An alternative to rolling would be to use a press to extrude the dough using a funnel shaped press. The engineering difficulty with a press would be to shape the press, and exert uniform pressure so the dough coming out is a shrunken version of the original.”
2026 Update: Estimation and Fermi Problems in Tech Interviews
Estimation-style puzzles (“how many golf balls fit in a school bus?”) have evolved but haven’t disappeared. In 2026, they appear as product metric estimation at Google, Meta, and Amazon PM interviews, and as back-of-envelope calculations in system design technical screens.
The modern form: “Estimate how many API requests Gmail handles per second” or “How much storage does Instagram need for photos per day?” These require the same decomposition skills as classic estimation puzzles — break into components, estimate each, combine.
Framework (unchanged since 2010, still valid):
- Clarify the question and state your assumptions explicitly
- Break the problem into estimable components
- Estimate each component with round numbers
- Combine and sanity-check the result
- Know when you’re off by an order of magnitude and say so
How AI changed this: Interviewers now know candidates have rehearsed common Fermi problems with AI. Expect novel problems: “Estimate the carbon footprint of a single GPT-4 API call” — same skill, new domain.