I decided that this year I was going to come up with one idea and do it for everyone. By 'everyone' I mean teachers, carers, friends, aunts and uncles, cousin, etc...
So I have always been praised on my baking so I though what a perfect idea to make everyone a box of my most favourite Christmas Cookies.
Well easier said than done really ... I had worked out that I needed to make 25 boxes of cookies and with each box containing 10 different flavours of cookie and then at least 2/3 of each flavour, suddenly I was preparing to make 500-750 cookies. Ekkkkk
I also failed to mention that my youngest baby boy was born on November 22nd...
Ohhhh so cute!
Anyway I had to get my baking on straight away or I knew I was never going to get those cookies ready on time.
For flavours I went for
- Christmas Choc-Chip Cookies
- Snowflake Cookies
- Red Velvet
- Gingerbread Men
- Oreo Peppermint Crunch
- Jam Drops
- Ginger Doodles
- White Choc Cranberry
- Sugar Cookies
- Chocolate Peppermint Cookies
So I started by making measuring out double batches of each different cookies and placing all the ingredients into labelled snap lock bags. For example I had all the dry ingredients for my gingerbread cookies in one bag, and all the wet in another.
Then it was time to make up the doughs. I did a couple of these a day to try and spread out the time I was spending in the kitchen. I had to work around naps, feeding, picking up children from child care and kindy etc.
This step consisted of using my pre-measured ingredients and mixing them up into the ready dough. Then using my LOVED ice cream scoop I divided all the dough onto lined baking trays and placed the trays into the freezer. I had a lot of cookie balls so I used some 'in between paper' between each layer of balls.
After a couple of hours, or overnight depending on my mood, I would take them out of the freezer and load them all into a large snap lock bag and placed them back into the freezer for storage. This processed helped me to ensure that I was giving each different person a box full of freshly baked cookies.
The next step was actually baking the cookies. I was lucky that I didn't need to give out these 25 boxes all on the same day, and I was actually able to spread it into 3 batches of 8/9 boxes each. The rest was time consuming, but relatively straight forward. I just took out the amount of cookies I needed of each flavour, lined then along my bench, let them defrost for a couple of minutes and then cooked them in batches in the oven.
I forgot to mention before that three of my cookie flavours were roll out cookies and with them I had to divide the dough into three to freeze, then rolled and cut the cookies when I was baking them.
Bagging and boxing...
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