In these days you can find the following "cutlery puzzle" lying on tables in the mensa. Longing for a solution?

Puzzle

Solution

cake

Analysis

The content doesn't seem to exhibit any special structure (alignment in a rectangle, any patterns in symbols,...). Thus one might guess that the content is probably in rows.

There are only three symbol classes, relatively regularly distributed, each directly repeats at most four times. How about trying morse code? After decoding, we get the following text:

YES MORSE CODE BUT NOT DONE YET NOW COUNT ROWS BETWEEN ALIGNED DOUBLE SPOON PAIRS

OK, let's follow the instructions and concentrate on double spoons (word delimiters). Looking at the first two columns, we can find two double spoons having 3 rows between them. There are another three such cases. The distances we get are 3-1-11-5. Converting into alphabet one gets CAKE.