Cookie Extravaganza 2012!

Did you have a good weekend?  Do any Christmas shopping? Baking? Decorating?

I spent Fri night planning and all day Saturday executing COOKIE EXTRAVAGANZA 2012!!!! (read that in a loud echoing voice).

Cookie Extravaganza is a tradition I have where I bake a ridiculous amount of cookies and then package them up as Christmas gifts. I like to give people a dozen cookies, 2 of 6 different types. This year I added Gluten Free recipes to the mix. Mandy (lil' sis) was nice enough to help me out this year. :) It was a lot of fun.

Here is the breakdown:

•  Chocolate Chip
• M&M
• Lemon & Strawberry Cake-Batter cookies
• Oatmeal Chocolate Chip
• Pastry Pillows (most labor intensive, but also best tasting)
• Sugar Cookies
• Peanut Butter Cookies (GF)
• Rice Crispy Squares dipped in Chocolate (GF)
• Oatmeal Chocolate Chip (GF)
• M&M (GF)

 I pulled out all the ingredients we needed and used my kitchen table as the ingredients station. I also used one counter for mixing/measuring, another for putting cookies onto cookie sheets and another for the cooling rake. After the cookies were cooled enough they went to the Dining Room table to wait to be bagged. It made for a very efficient Kitchen if I do say so myself. :)

Look how much stuff we used!

This just gives you an idea of the sheer quantity of cookies...this only shows three of the 11 types of cookies we made.

 Most disappointing cookie: Chocolate Chip and M&M Cookies
These were the first thing we made and boy were we off to a rough start. These are the most simple cookies we did all day and they just came out...ugly. See them on the right hand side of the below picture? I ended up not using them for most of the bags because they were just too ugly. They still tasted good so LJ got a cookie jar full of ugly Chocolate Chip cookies. 

Most Difficult: Oatmeal Chocolate Chip (GF)
These tasted great, but no matter what I did the dough just melted and they ended up being almost as thin as potato chips. I even tried using this brownie form thing - I'm glad I tested it before I loaded up the form, they looked ok at first but crumbled to pieces when I tried to get them out.

Thinner than pancakes

Test with brownie tray

Took the Most Time: Pastry Pillows
They look like Ravioli, don't they? Well that's pastry filled with raspberry preserves. They result is flaky and tastes wonderful if you warm it up in the microwave right before you eat it.

 MVP: The Oven
While Mandy is a close second (thanks for all your help!!!) I have to give the MVP award to my oven. We had it on for 12 hours straight and it didn't poop out on me. I've had ovens do that in the past. Not going to lie, my brand loyalty for Whirlpool just got a little stronger. 

After it was all said and done I was able to make bags of cookies for everyone on my list. The end total was over 500 cookies (counting the ones I didn't use because they were ugly). I got the bags for the cookies from Hobby Lobby. They were 50% off so I got 20 for $1. Can't beat that !

Now to clean the kitchen.....ugh.