The story might be apocryphal, but bakers indeed do use cookies to test proportions of ingredients. You’re not going to waste a whole pound of flour just to see the effect of more or less butter in a particular recipe. You do a little bit and bake them in cookie proportions. Specially when you have to make several hundred pounds of cake at a time, you can’t afford to err on the measurements, and you do need to know variations in the flour.
Your ape’s first anthropogenic climate disaster.