Christmas Baking, Day One

When Robyn and I decided that we were going to having a baking day, we thought it would be a fun way to spend a girls' afternoon. Originally other girlies were suppose to join us, but it ended up just being the two of us.

Our plan?

1. Make 548 cookies in less than eight hours (sugar, gingerdrops, magic cookie bars, cinnamon-oatmeal, peppermint bark, divinity, mexican wedding cakes, blossoms, and shortbread).
2. Create 37 cookie packages to give away as presents with the cookies (10 for Robyn, 15 for Jenni, 5 for Tawni, and 7 for Desiree).

The plan execution started on Wednesday (12/9) when I put all the ingrediants for each type of cookie into the magic of an excel spreadsheet and sorted it to combine it for a shopping list. Off to Walmart I went, picking up 15 pounds of flour, 27 eggs, 12 1/2 cups of butter, etc!!

Saturday morning, Robyn arrives promptly at 10 am. Reese, wearing her new Christmas sweater, is confused about the actions, but happy to sit in her bed and blanket and watch...
I'm prepared with my pink Christmas shirt (which you've sadly missed out on) and my mom-made, cute apron.

Robyn is ready with her giant KitchenAid mixer, but sadly without her shield for dry ingredient (look closely to the flour explosion in this picture... this is what happens when you triple a shortbread recipe without your shield).

Our trusty mixers worked and worked, spinning and churing butter, eggs, flour and sugar so we didn't have to (several times we mentioned, "what did people do without theses?" and came to the conclusion that no one would have tried to make this many cookies in one day without a beauty like my red and her white KitchenAid mixer)... the second mixing bowl that I registered for when we got married, but haven't used, came in very handy as some recipes required refrigeration.

This is what 120 sugar cookies look like...

It worked out well that I have A LOT of counter space, because we used every square inch of it... just the ingredients took over this corner. This picture was taken about an hour into the day.

The first set of cookies go into the oven! Robyn's mom's famous shortbread cookies, cut into squares with a snowflake impression from my terracotta cookie press.

We continued until we were tired, then kept going... here Robyn is making Mexican wedding cakes as I peel Chocolate candy cane kisses for the blossom cookies.

We decided that it was time to stop when the Mexican wedding cakes came out the of oven like this...

Still in the frig are the sugar cookies in dough format and never touched is the ingredients for divinity...

oh for another day...