Cookaholics Bulletin Board

In less than 24 hours, and less than 4 hours of actual baking time, I baked just over 2,000 cookies! The baking is easy, it's all that making of the dough...



I still have a few more (some pine nut cookies and some shortbread) but this is pretty much it for the season. Of course, there are always those new recipes we see that we HAVE to make.

Goodness, I feel like such a slouch. Yesterday I managed the dough for world peace cookies and a batch of chocolate chip. I think I was distracted by the hot buttered rum. Looks great Dave!

Mary

Wow Dave...I'm jealous, both as a baker and an eater

Good lord Dave, how big is your oven?

I am humbled by your prowess. I'll be lucky to get 8 batches of cookies done this year.

Dave, would you come here and help me get mine finished?

I've managed to make one double batch of those peanut butter things with the chocolate kiss on top, and seriously doubting if I'll get any further. This year it's all just getting away from me.

In this case, size matters! I can put 3 full sheets in it at once, since it is a convection oven, and it is great for baking thin, crispy cookies, which is what most of those are.

I baked a new type of shortbread today - one I put some rosemary in, which is very good, and this time I flavored it in a different way: I steeped the chopped up rosemary in the melted butter, strained it, then let the butter cool, whisking it occasionally until it started to solidify, then cooled completely. I really liked the flavor when I tried it another year, but not the annoying pieces of needles in the cookies, despite mincing it up as fine as I could. Not sure if I used enough, but I am still working on it.

I did have help, BTW. The first night I did 8 recipes myself, about 720 in just 5 batches. Then the next morning a friend stopped by, and we did the rest of the icebox cookies - 15 recipes, about 1100 - in 10 batches. Then, my Mom and sister came by to help be roll out the snickerdoodles - only 400 in just 5 batches, but labor intensive, and messy, as well.

Here's an example of even when you have made thousands of something, you can still screw up! When I took my first batch of regular snickerdoodles out of the oven, they were flat! Too late to fix the rest, since that was more than a recipe and a half, and the rest were ready to pop in the oven. Turns out, my mistake must have been transposing the flour amounts of the two recipes, having made them the same night and ended up putting 2 instead of 3 c in all three recipes. Fortunately, I didn't put 3 instead of 2 in the other recipe! They're still good, and it turns out a couple people liked them better, but I won't be doing that again...I hope.

Mmmmm ... rosemary shortbread!

Try using a spice grinder to mince the rosemary, that way you can get the needle bits down to an even 1mm mince.

I was going to try that, but this method came to mind when I thought of this method being used in a pasta dish, and the absence of the rosemary making it look much cleaner, and giving it sort of a surprise flavor. It is much easier, however, to simply add the herb to the dough.

one more batch of caramel made today, all the toffee cut and the other caramel from last week cut and wrapped. Just bought 10 more pounds of butter and will attempt more biscotti tomorrow night, I don't think I have enough.
I also made Cook Country's butter toffee popcorn on Friday night to give out to the boys on my youngest's house league team from DH as he's the coach. Kids seemed to like it. phew. Now to make large caramel and chocolate covered pretzel rods for the select team, as he is also the coach. Some of the same kids on both, so I don't want to repeat the gift.