Christmas Baking

I swear, I am actually sick of CHOCOLATE! I would have never believed that this could be.

For those of you who do not know me very well, I have to admit I'm kind of an 'all or nothing' sort of chick. You see, I have never been one to do the 'baking cookies' thing at Christmas. I have heard of it but I have never really taken part. This year I found some awesome sounding cookie recipes on the net. Oh ya, I am also very anal retentive and usually organize myself to the extreme. I think that was a trait I got from my Mom. She used to make a detailed list (times and everything) to do her housework. Funny thing, the list took so long to make there was no time to really do any housework. I'm just like her! So I entered all of the ingredients for each of the 12 kinds of cookies I was prepared to make. I sorted the ingredients so I had a beautiful shopping list. I figured I might as well buy all of the ingredients because if I happened to actually have any of these already in the house it surely wouldn't be in the mass quantities I needed.

Off I went with my shopping list. I hit the bulk food store first. I needed something like 100 squares of chocolate, pounds and pounds of nuts, assorted sugars, 43 caramels and on, and on...the first store cost me like $85.00. Holy Crap this was going to be expensive! I stopped at the dollar store because I was gonna need a lot of cookie tins to give this crap away! I got 3 Christmas tins, 6 Christmas plates and 3 Christmas bowls, another $10.00.

I was meeting Cindy and Aeron to go and see Happy Feet before my culinary skills could be put to use. They said they would come back to my house to help. That would be fun.

I stopped at Sobey's on the way home to pick up the peanut butter, butter, cream cheese and on and on...that bill came to another sixty bucks! These better be frickin good cookies. My other thought was...there's no turning back now!

Well Cindy and Aeron lasted a couple of hours. That was pretty good. But I still had mounds of ingredients to plow through.

You have to understand that we have a relatively small Town House. There were cookies EVERYWHERE!!

Then came Sunday, I just had to finish this project. Unfortunately I left the sugar cookies to the last batch. You see, these are the only cookies that actually had to be decorated. I had spent a total of 10 hours standing in the kitchen when these damn things came out of the oven. Do you think I cared that the snot coloured icing and the putrid pink/red icing was nicely slathered on these things. I just pushed the pretty little sparkles on so they would stick! UG!

David cried out from the Family Room. He hadn't eaten a proper meal in two days. There was no room for anything anywhere but cookies. I ended up making 544 of these things. Then I had to figure out who in there right mind would take these things off my hands. I packaged them up in their little tins, plates and bowls. They did look pretty. I figured it out and each cookie ended up costing .30 each! I could go to Walmart and buy 100 cookies for $5.99... BUT.. I would miss the experience.

Maybe I could just make a few less next year, but, probably not.