Baking Day!

In the past, I've coordinated my massive baking day to occur on a weekend...I guess believing I'd have the most time. It dawned on me this year, though, that I'd be much more productive to do it on a day when the family is all occupied. With Mikayla set for a playdate with Kenady, Wednesday was the chosen day to tackle all this.....

13 hours later...
All of this was created - which included:
86 Frosted Sugar Cookies
43 Lemon Coconut Cookies
100 Cocoa Peppermint Cookies
90 Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
60 Mounds Bars
132 Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Pretzel Cookies
102 Molasses Cookies
70 Samoa Bars
100 Pieces of Saltine Toffee
and 3 Pans of Fudge


While I LOVED the quiet time of productively baking away by myself watching adorable Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, by 7:30pm, I was dog-tired, poisoned from too much sugar and no protein, and dehydrated. As a result, I was terribly nauseous - so much so that I had to enlist the help of the family to do quick wrap-ups of each of the trays that I hastily distributed equal amounts of cookies to.

Even laying in bed, I couldn't get my mind off of the day's activities - which led me to seeing cookies - which just made me that much more ready to throw up. It takes a lot to turn me off of sugar - I had definitely exceeded my limit. However, early Thursday morning, I was feeling great again and ready to polish off the cookie trays and print out labels of recipient names and contents before John left so that he could be Santa and deliver them to work.

While it may seem like over-kill, the appreciation expressed from John's co-workers and boss at Tyson Steele Practice Marketing always makes it worthwhile. Not to mention the fact that we are SET for Christmas Day cookies at Mom and Dad's as well as our trip to Sunriver. I figure if I'm going to trash my kitchen to bake, I might as well trash it to the hilt and go all the way. I'm not positive if all of the recipes were perfect this year - those that I taste-tested were, but frankly, towards the end, I couldn't muster the will-power to try them all. I've definitely gotten much more stream-lined in how I follow the recipes, the order that I do them all and not wasting any baking time. The fact that I can use a convection oven and have awesome baker size cookie sheets accommodating up to 45 cookies at a time in the oven does allow me to crank through the baking aspect a little faster.

Still, I'm super thankful that this is crossed off my list. While I don't think I'm necessarily done with baking this Christmas season, nothing I attempt will be nearly as taxing as this. =)