Death by Zucchini

With all the baking and fundraising and whatnot, my gardening time has been pretty scarce this summer. Luckily, we've had sufficient rain at convenient intervals, and I haven't had to water (much). Therefore, my garden attention has been limited to thrice-weekly tomato picking and once-weekly Swiss chard picking. The (!@*&#) bunnies munched the pole beans a few weeks back (hence no beans to pick), and I grow yellow-skinned zucchini ('Gold Rush') that are usually pretty easy to spot and pluck at the right youthful moment. So, pretty low-maintenance, right?

I should have known my laissez-faire attitude would get me in trouble eventually. Look what the zucchini plants did when my back was turned.




The only hope for it was to butcher them, scrape out the seeds, and shred them in the Cuisinart. I now have 13 pounds of shredded zucchini in my freezer. Who wants some?

Here are the offending plants. Notice how they have taken over the pathway.


I swear, I can hear them snickering at me when I go out there.

Week Four -- My Head Is Still Spinning!

So you remember those photos of my living room from from mid-last-week? That was nothing. Guess what it looked like by 8pm Friday.


It started on my cell phone at about 5:15 ("Do you mind if I bring some stuff over this evening? Is it too late?"), continued with messages on the home voice mail and live calls during dinner prep, and finished up with neighbors dropping by en practical mass up until 8:30 or so. Michael and I were stunned by the last-minute (wonderful) onslaught, but our reactions were definitely tempered by the dodgey weather reports (rolling thunderstorms throughout the night and early morning hours, maaaaaaaaaaybe tapering off by 7am, maybe not -- maybe continuing all day Saturday! Whee!).

So, panicked as I was at the thought of having to cancel the yard sale and the prospect of living with all this dross in my house for weeks on end, I did what any sensible person would have done. I made cookies. (It did eventually occur to me that rain would not only scotch any yard sale activity but would seriously hamper cookie sales, as well. But I was programmed to make cookies, and make cookies I did.)

Now, this will be hard to believe, but last week there were some mommies at the booth with toddler-types who didn't think it appropriate to buy cookies at the ungodly hour of 10:30am (the mommies, not the toddlers). Can you imagine?! Not my kind of mommies, for sure. But it did spark a good idea. Did you know that you can serve cake for breakfast if you call it a muffin? Me, too! So, I reached for Dorie's wonderful Lemon Poppyseed Muffin recipe.

I adore Dorie's technique of massaging the zest with the sugar to release all of the wonderful citrus oils. This is a very easy muffin; the only tricky part is making sure your poppyseeds haven't gone rancid in the cupboard while your back was turned.

I had made an executive decision early on that each week's offerings must include something chocolatey. We've been yacking over at CooksTalk about Alice Medrich's recipe for Classic Cocoa Brownies (from Bittersweet, which is an excellent book), so naturally, I turned to it as well. This is my kind of brownie -- gooey rather than cakey, and with a crispy crusty top (none of this icing or glazing nonsense on my brownies , please). Alice says that the crispy crust comes from the granulated sugar content (among other things), and I have no reason not to believe her. I double the recipe and bake it in a 9" x 12" pan instead of a square 8" -- that way you get nice thick brownies. (During this whole process, I am always trying to be mindful of making treats that have appropriate heft for the $1 price tag. These brownies definitely qualified.)

Although I premeasured a lot of the ingredients earlier in the week to save time, the muffins and brownies had to be mixed and baked on Friday night. So the third offering had to be an easy drop cookie with make-ahead batter. The Peanut Butter Chocolate Kisses had been popular a few weeks back, so I decided on Peanut Butter & Jellies (Dorie, once again). It's the same cookie dough as the Chocolate Kiss cookies. The recipe's brilliance is in the handling of the jam, which gets boiled on the stovetop and carefully spooned into the cavities of the baked (still warm) cookies where it sets up nicely and holds its shape without jiggling about. I'm not a jam-maker, but I suspect that what happens chemically is that the boiling "unsets" the pectin in the jam, and that the cooling process "resets" the pectin, causing the wonderful firm, clean, glossy set of the jam centers.

I ended up with 36 Peanut Butter & Jellies, 24 muffins, and 32 brownies, and we went uneasily to bed, serenaded by violent thunder, lighting, and steady rain.

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Even though I was exhausted, I had a hard time sleeping. It felt in many ways like the first day of school -- such anticipation mixed with dread! Michael woke up first, and his clunking about the bedroom spurred me to crack my eyes open to check on the weather. Gray-ish, but not too dark, and no plinky-plunky sounds. I dragged myself out of bed and peeked through the blinds. No rain falling! The pavement was wet in patches but dry in others, which gave me hope that the ground would not be sopping wet.

We left the kids to fend for themselves with dry cereal and staggered outside to set up tables, mop off wet spots, and start carrying the flotilla of .... stuff.... outside. The advertised start time of the sale was 9am, and we had our first drive-by at 7:15am (friends had warned us to be prepared for this). By 8am, people were ignoring the fact that we still weren't set up, and simply parked their cars and started rummaging through still-packed bags while Michael and I made endless trips back and forth. We made our first sale almost immediately, and it really never stopped after that.

We sold books, we sold VHS tapes. We sold a child's guitar, we sold luggage. We sold ugly costume jewelry and lots of little china and glass trinkety things. We sold stained glass windows and lighting fixtures and a tricycle and my mother's copper salmon mold which hung on her kitchen wall while I was growing up. We sold mismatched bedroom end tables and candles and stemware and golf balls and tablecloths and tarps still in their wrappers. We sold handbags and shoes. We sold hardware storage boxes with zillions of compartments and decorative plates and a brand-new ELPH digital camera. We sold plush toys and comic books. We sold the clay cooker that Michael's mother bought us as an anniversary gift years ago and that only got used once. We sold the fabulous puppet theatre that was Quin's "big gift" on the occasion of his fourth birthday. We sold the footstool that I used to rock myself in the old wicker rocking chair while nursing the boys.

And the sun came out.



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I left Michael with some reluctance at 9:45 to go sell cookies. The sun was out, the humidity was returning, and I had lots of customers. Lemonade and iced tea (peach, this week) were very popular. I told everyone that the tea was so sweet because I LET MY HUSBAND MAKE IT THIS WEEK, but few people seemed to mind much.

I did manage to finally get a picture of the brownies. Yum, gooey.



And of the muffins with their zigzags of glaze.



We sold a few dog biscuits to a happy customer.



There were a lot of familiar faces this week, including the regular Co-Op lunch crowd, a young dad with his 2-year-old daughter who likes to climb on the wrought iron patio chairs like a marmoset, the lovely Shaeffer family with their boys and visiting cousin from San Diego, and one of our family's oldest friends from Swarthmore.

We moved here when I was 6, and there was a family living across the street with 4 kids who were clustered age-wise right around me and my brothers. Even though they moved to another part of town before many years had passed, they remained our closest family friends throughout the years. My bridal shower (the one for the "grown-up" friends and relatives) was given by their wonderful mom, Mrs. I., and some years later, my mom and I hosted a bridal shower for their eldest daughter. My first serious crush was on their eldest son (oh, how a sixth grader can pine!). My dad and Mr. I. have been orchestra-going partners for decades now, Mrs. I. called me on my late-night reading habits when I was about 12 (she could see the light of my tiny reading lamp through the window and across the street during the wee hours) -- but she didn't rat me out to my mom. When my mom went back to work, if we kids got sent home from school sick, we always went to their house and got to watch cartoons, which was plenty of incentive to get sick and sent home from school. When more serious, adult issues arose -- mysterious and frightening illnesses among family members, the discovery of a child molester in our neighborhood -- they were always the trusted source of strength and support. Looking back, it truly feels as though I had a second set of parents while growing up, and what a blessing it is to feel that.

Mrs. I. had come by the cookie booth a few weeks back, and we had a lovely, though brief, chat. Mr. I. happened by this week, and he pulled up a chair and stayed a while. We chatted about their kids and grandkids, the summer travels and new jobs and current projects. I told him of our boys' current mischiefs and how glad I feel to be doing this project right now. He eventually got up to do his shopping, and swinging back around a few minutes later to grab a sack of cookies, his parting words to me were "You're doing a good thing." I couldn't feel more proud than if my own father had said so.

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So I sold cookies and muffins and brownies and lemonade and iced tea and made $108! I staggered home at 1pm to rescue Michael, who had been also going non-stop (and without lunch) all this time. And as he pointed out, at least I got to sit down while he was on his feet 95% of the time! The flow of yardsalers had mostly stopped, so we surveyed the wreckage with an eye toward "now what."

There is soooooooooooo much stuff left over, you guys wouldn't even believe it. We still have a fax machine and ice-hockey skates and bikes and a CD player and a quilt rack and a sleeping bag and cookware and TONS OF BOOKS, YO! It took almost 2 hours to pack it all up again, with a few judicious boxes going directly to Goodwill without passing Go first. Guess how much leftover stuff is now in my basement! Go on, guess!


That's about 10 boxes worth, people, NOT COUNTING THE 7 BOXES OF BOOKS IN THE LIVING ROOM.

Three guesses who's having another yard sale in the fall?

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We made an amazing $683 on the yard sale, and the number continues to creep up as Quinlan keeps discovering books in the living room boxes that he wants to buy. Can you believe it? Me neither. All told, our total money raised to date is hovering right around $2300.

Mr. I. was right. We're really doing something good.

An Appreciation

I want to take a little time-out post to throw some appreciation to the blogger who inspired me to get writing, though she doesn't know it. Mir at http://www.wouldashoulda.com/ is whip-funny and bitingly smart. And she writes well. She also raised $6,000 for breast cancer research, largely through the power of the internet and her amazing blog.

Mir writes about the challenges of raising kids, the business of writing, and the daily business of life in a way that is alternatively heart-rending and down-right hilarious. She doesn't know me from a hole in the ground, but that shouldn't stop you from visiting her blog and telling her how pretty she is. You'll be glad you did.

Tiptoeing Through the Stuff

If we do not make a zillion billion dollars at Saturday's yard sale, it will not be due to lack of wherewithall.






This is what my living room has looked like for the last 2 weeks. Stuff from co-workers, stuff from neighbors, stuff from families of the kids' friends, stuff from my boss, stuff from my own extended family members. Terrific stuff, some of it; junky stuff, some of it. And there is supposedly more stuff coming. Even with borrowing every folding table on the block, I'm still not going to have enough space to display it all.

Pray for us.

This Is Weird, When I Stop to Think about It

Usually when I bake, I end up with various smallish oven burns on my hands and forearms, due to moving too fast, getting distracted by boys and dog, and the like. I've been baking (what feels like non-stop) for the last 3 weeks and I don't yet have a single oven burn. It's almost as if there is an outside force looking over me and this project ............

Do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do!

Week Three

Yesterday was incredible. Hot on the heels of our newspaper article , we had a boffo day. Every single baked item got sold -- what a thrill! We also went through a full gallon of lemonade and half a gallon of herbal iced tea. (The beverages have been much slower-moving compared to the baked goodies.)

My garden is producing tons of zucchini this month, so I decided to make zucchini cupcakes, using the zucchini bread recipe from the new King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book. My kids don't care for raisins or nuts in baked goods, so I left them out. The result was a rather bland little cupcake, particularly when compared with the zucchini cupcakes from Rose Levey Berenbaum. I sent one to day camp in Garrick's snack bag, and he was underwhelmed (Quin wouldn't even give them a tumble). This did not bode well, and I still had 23 cupcakes on the counter.

Those who are at all familiar with my baking habits know that I'm a firm believer in the power of buttercream. Not the gritty confectioner's sugar + shortening goop that passes for buttercream in most chain bakeries, but the real stuff -- silky smooth buttercream, starting with a base of either meringue or whipped egg yolks, stabilized by the addition of a hot sugar syrup and carefully emulsified with unctuous sweet butter, real vanilla extract or liqueurs, or folded with fresh lemon curd or cooled melted bittersweet chocolate. I like cake, don't get me wrong, but I confess that I value cake less for its own sake than as a conveyance for buttercream.

So, when life gives you bland little cupcakes, turn to buttercream! Here is what I found in my freezer:

Each of those containers holds buttercream -- maybe a few tablespoons, maybe a cup or more, in every possible color and flavor -- left over from various Cake Projects of Yore. I was pretty embarrassed at how much room their removal created in the extra freezer, but Michael kindly refrained from taunting me about it.

I whipped up a new batch of Italian meringue buttercream, folded in about 3/4 cup of lemon curd (also discovered lurking in the bowels of the freezer), and iced the cupcakes. Lookin' better already.

The plan was to use the various snips and bits of colored buttercream to decorate the cupcakes, making them so appealing and scrumptious-looking that our customers wouldn't be off-put by the zucchini and whole-grain-ness of it all.

When in doubt, I make flowers.

I iced the green leaves on Friday night, but didn't place the flowers until Saturday morning. The buttercream flowers are a bit fragile and prone to melting, so I stored them in the freezer on baking sheets overnight. In the morning, they were firm enough to easily peel off their parchment squares. They needed a few moments to warm on my fingertips before placing onto the cupcakes, but from there it was child's play.

I had made and refrigerated cookie dough earlier in the week: Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice cookies and Midnight Crackles, both from Dorie. I began Friday evening with baking off the molasses cookie dough. No matter what I did, I could not prevent the utter and complete flattening of the cookies. I chilled the dough hard on the baking sheets after shaping; I turned the oven down 25*, I didn't flatten the dough balls after rolling. No good. Here's what I got.

The above pix are about 30 seconds out of the oven, while still slightly puffed. After they cooled and set, they were absolute pancakes:

Very frustrating! While the flavor was excellent, the cookies were very soft (I was trying to bake at the minimum amount of time possible to avoid flattenage) and did not look very appealing. Once again, buttercream to the rescue.


We sold them as Ginger-Lemon Whoopie Pies and they were flying off the table! (On a side note, I was describing these concoctions to a much-younger co-worker this morning, and she didn't know from Whoopie Pies. Boy, I'm getting old.)

Once again -- the power of buttercream cannot be denied.

In all the panic over the above, I somehow missed photographing this week's third offering, Dorie's Midnight Crackle cookies. Apologies! These are a butter cookie, but on the drier side -- almost a sable in texture. They came out very well, and the little corner I managed to taste was very rich and chocolatey. Quinlan gave them a 4 out of 5 -- I think if they had been at all gooey, they would have gotten a perfect score from him.

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Saturday was another perfect day, weather-wise -- low-mid 80s, sunny and breezy. We have been so lucky! We took the suggestion of the Co-op's manager and bought some balloons to draw attention to ourselves this week.

As you can see from the facial expressions, the kids were especially pumped up this week! Here are the cupcakes in natural light.

They sold out first, then the Whoopie Pies, then the leftover Applesauce Spice Bars (which held amazingly well), then the Midnight Crackles. We sold so much so fast that I phoned my mom at 11:30 to warn her that there might not be anything left if she didn't put down the Times crossword and scoot on over!

Sitting at the table was really an amazing experience this week. In the wake of the article, many people who stopped were eager to talk -- about ways in which PKD has touched their lives and lives of their neighbors, about having lost family members to kidney failure, about their astonishment that this disease is not more widely known. Many had questions about what causes PKD and what the current research is focusing on. One older Swarthmore resident who has been by the booth every week had good news to report -- her friend who has been battling kidney failure got a new kidney next week, and is doing very well post-transplant. I don't even know these women past a hello, how are you, and I wept.

Other visitors this week included -- again! -- our young Mennonite baker friend, whose name we finally learned is Linda. A very sweet girl, she continues to be amazed that I make all of the baked goods at home. (Perhaps she's surprised that any "English" bake at home?) She walked over from the farmer's market in her bare feet, and I think she enjoyed my motherly teasing. The head of the bakery, a young Mennonite man in his early 30s, came by as well and offered to help out, which was so touching.

We also met an out-of-towner who was here looking at houses. When we asked where he was looking, it turns out it was right around the corner from us! We kvelled about the town and the school system, and told him to look us up after settlement.

Theo came by, as well. Isn't he handsome?

Total haul for the day was $128 -- twice what we made last week. Pretty amazing! That brings the bake sale total to $275. The money counted, I fell down for a nice nap, woke up, and asked Quin -- "So, what should we bake for next week?"

He was very amused.

Out of the Closet

Take a look.

Holy Cow!

I just did the math, and between the bake sale and direct gifts through the web site, we've raised over $1000!! I'm beside myself! We're having a yard sale next Saturday as yet another way to boost fundraising, and the article about the whole project will be in tomorrow's local paper. Yowsa! (Fundraising was never this much fun when I did it for a living -- I wonder why that is? ; )

Did I mention what we're baking for Week Three? Iced whole wheat zucchini muffins from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book, and Dorie's excellent Midnight Crackle cookies and Ginger Spice cookies. The muffins are already done (but un-iced) and dough for both cookies is in the fridge. Michael is out for the evening and once the kids are down, I just may make a big bowl of popcorn and slug about in bed watching bad reality TV for a few hours. Heaven.

Week Two

I need to pace myself better than I did last week -- I didn't realize how tired I was until I returned home from a few errands on Sunday morning and had to lie down. I slept a lot on Sunday, left work early on Monday to sleep more, and didn't really "snap to" again until Wednesday. By then, Michael had a crazed look in his eye, the clean, unfolded laundry was snarling from its corner*, the dog was stealing bits of said laundry in frantic bids for Attention, Please!, and the kids were in danger of going to camp Thursday morning in their all-togethers. So yesterday evening was dedicated to Putting Things to Rights, and now here I am, a mere 2 days from Week! Three! and I'm blogging instead of baking.

(*My wonderful husband cooks dinner every night, makes school lunches, cleans the parrot's cage, and rubs my back. He even still buys me flowers, after 17 years of marriage. But appropriate methodology for dealing with clean laundry -- with the exceptions of sock and underwear -- still eludes him.)

So! For the second week of the bake sale, we decided on 3 recipes from Dorie Greenspan's excellent book "Baking from My Home to Yours." If you bake at all, you need a copy of this book. Go over to Amazon and put it in your cart;I'll wait. This is what you're looking for:


For this week we chose chocolate chocolate cupcakes, applesauce spice bars, and peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chippers. If you've been following along, you know that I believe that the peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chippers are quite simply the best cookie ever. 'Nuff said. Needless to say, the pic does not do them justice. These cookies are best appreciated with a nice, cold glass of milk. And of course, we sold most of them and had very few leftovers, dang it.

One full recipe of this dough yielded 36 jumbo (6 per half-sheet) cookies. When portioning the cookies for home use, I go a bit smaller and end up with close to 5 dozen pieces. In other words, this is a LOT of dough, but the good news is that you can leave the unbaked dough in the fridge for several days and simply scoop and bake when the urge strikes you. In fact, I do highly recommend following Dorie's recommendation to chill the dough before baking to avoid super-flat cookies.

The chocolate chocolate cupcakes went together beautifully, but I must admit with embarrasment that somehow I did not actually taste one. Terrible oversight. My Quality Control team gave them enthusiastic thumbs up, though.



I'm sorry I don't have a better picture of the decorations, such as they were -- swirls of vanilla and chocolate buttercream with a bit of sprinkle on top was the most I could manage. (Maybe that was the point at which it should have dawned on me that I was seriously fatigued?) Out of 24 cupcakes, I think we sold all but 6.

The applesauce spice bars get raaaaaaaaaaaves from everyone who tries them. They were quite good, but -- I think I'm going to need to try them again. The base was very moist, to the point of gooey, but the sides had started to shrink from the sides of the pan, so I took them out of the oven....... I think next time I'll let them go a little longer. Here is the base au naturel


and here it is with the glaze.



You can see in the unglazed pic that I should have chopped the apple smaller. The glaze is a thing of beauty, but! There wasn't enough of it. I had doubled the recipe and made 2 pans of the base. When I made a double recipe of the glaze, however, I needed the whole batch to adequately cover one pan of base. So I advise making double the glaze for each pan of bars you make.

The glaze is very rich and sweet. In combination with the gooeyness of the bars, it just wasn't doing it for me. My taste buds were overpowered. I'm thinking a pinch of salt or a glug of lemon juice in the glaze next time to provide a bit of contrast. If any of you (legions of readers! okay, handful of readers) have tried this recipe, I'm eager to hear what you thought.

I must add that the customers who bought the applesauce spice bars -- including my young Mennonite friend! -- loved them, sticky fingers and all. So maybe I'm the only one who finds them too rich? We brought 32 bars, and it was too many -- I still have 18 or so in the fridge. I have a feeling that a container will find its way down the street to Mimi's house in the morning.... do you think she'd notice if I hide some garden zucchini in there as well?

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It was another lovely day -- sunny, mid-80's, and a bit of a breeze. Much less foot traffic than for Week One, and I consider we did well to earn the $67 that we did -- again, with no pre-publicity. We had some repeat customers, which was really nice, and a few people who were really interested in learning more about PKD.







It also happened to be Michael's and my 17th (!!!) anniversary on Saturday, and he surprised the heck out of me by showing up at the cookie booth with this in tow:







Isn't that pretty?

Brain dead

I'm sorry not to have posted sooner, folks -- I have lots of pix and recipe reviews, but I crashed really hard after the sale on Saturday and am just starting to get the synapses firing again. I'll try to catch up this evening.

In brief, we made a bit less money this week -- about $67. There was just less traffic, and I think we're going to see a lot of ups and downs like this. It was great to see some repeat customers, though, including the sweet Mennonite girl from last week!

More to come.......

Prepping for Day Two

Well, the article didn't come out today, which means we'll be heading into Day Two of the bake sale with the same (lack of) publicity that we had for Day One. But! The extra week means that we have time to take a good photo to accompany the article. And the weather forecast is 86* and sunny, which is really perfect cookie-buying weather, if you think about it.

If all else fails, we're going to put a sandwich board on Garrick and let him parade the sidewalks to drum up business.

(I've seen a draft of the article, but am sure that it would be in bad form to post it before it actually gets published. It's a good article! That's all I'm sayin'.)

As a pleasant augury for Saturday, this morning while buying a cup of coffee I ran into one of our customers from last week. Her: "Those cookies were good!" Me: "Great! We'll be there again tomorrow......." (Shameless, I am.)

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Guess what? We've raised $750 just through donations to the Walk for a Cure link. I am so touched and moved by everyone's responses. The kids had a collective cow when I told them -- our original goal was $500 for the whole project! Can you believe it? Me, neither. Thank you, everyone. You know who you are.

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So, a minor change in the baking line-up for tomorrow. We were going to make Rose Levey Berenbaum's Mrs. King's Irresistibles, which are basically a granola-oatmeal-raisin cookie. But I couldn't find unsweetened granola to save my life. So, we're substituting Dorie's Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chippers, which would be the cookie I would bring with me onto a desert island if I could only bring one cookie with me. Truly, these things are amazing. I've made them 3 times, and invariably eat more than are good for me, even though I know better. (Luckily, my mom -- hi, Mom! -- likes them too, and she's right down the street, so I usually remove temptation that-a-way.)

But really, what's not to like? It's a peanut butter cookie with oatmeal and cinnamon, and lots of chocolate chips throughout. Great flavor combination, great texture, perfect for dunking in a big glass of milk or eating along side a cuppa tea or coffee. If you haven't made them yourself yet, what are you waiting for?

I started prepping a little late this week -- like, last night at 7:30. The base cookies for the Applesauce Spice Bars are done (2 pans), as is the dough for the Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chippers. Tonight I have to glaze the Applesauce Spice Bars, make and ice/decorate cupcakes, and bake off the cookie dough. Thank goodness for all the leftover buttercreams and chocolate glazes in my freezer, but I'm still going to be up late. Must do better for next week.

But still no oven burns, so I'm doing something right. Pictures tomorrow!

The Interview

I just finished. I was very good -- didn't cry at all until the very end. There is a chance it won't be published until next week (boo), but I'm still hoping for this Friday. Cross your fingers!

DAY ONE WENT GREAT!

(You can see me reflected below in the store window -- hee! Shall I pretend to be brilliant and say I planned it that way? Photography is NOT among my gifts.)

The weather couldn't have been better, we had our first customers almost immediately, several friends dropped by (including friends of the kids'), and everyone was really nice about listening to me spiel about PKD. (Not surprisingly, at least one customer mentioned that she knows people who are affected by PKD. I suspect we'll get more of these.) Now that we've gotten through our "test run" I feel much more confident.

We started at 10am (which is when the adjacent farmers' market opens) and the kids really hung in there; finally, I had Michael take them home at noon while I stayed for another hour, hoping to sell off the last few cookies. Our Co-Op serves lunch on the patio on Saturdays, grilling burgers and sausage to order, and I figured we'd pick up some action from the lunchers, but it didn't really happen.

I think my favorite customer was the young Mennonite girl -- probably about 13 or 14 -- who wandered over from the Farmers' Market. She had a delightful, lilting accent, and seemed amazed to hear that the cookies had been baked by us at home. She bought a chocolate chipper and 2 glasses of lemonade, and was just lovely.

The kids' favorite customer was Goosey.

Whatever you do, do NOT attempt to pet a Doberman Pinscher while it's eating. She was Not Amused. But she did like the biscuits!

We sold all but 8 of the 68 cookies cookies we brought, plus a few baggies of dog biscuits. The lemonade didn't sell well -- less than a gallon -- but the gorgeous, coolish, breezy weather probably had something to do with that. Next week, we'll try brewed herbal iced tea in addition to the lemonade -- it's supposed to get HOT.

Best of all, with no publicity other than our 2 homemade posters, we made $80.55! Michael had the brilliant idea of putting up a poster showing our progress each week, so we'll get that going and hope it motivates people. Here's how the table looked at the end of the day. The staff at the Co-Op were happy to take the last few (sun-baked) cookies off my hands.

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Reporting on the recipes: Grandma's Sugar Cookies, from Dorie Greenspan's excellent "Baking from My Home to Yours", were terrific. I added a hit of cinnamon and multi-color sprinkles on top. Good flavor and a nice chewiness -- a wonderfully simple, old-fashioned cookie. The recipe calls for chilling the dough and then either rolling it out with a pin, or doing a slice-and-bake approach. Happily, my chill-then-scoop approached worked just fine. It is a very soft dough, though, so do not skip the chilling step.

The peanut butter cookies are also from Dorie -- Peanut Butter Thumbprints, with a Hershey's kiss substituted for the jam in the thumbprint. Again, delicious cookie, with a sandy bite and more fragility than the butter cookies. A few of them broke under the stress of transport and sunlight, forcing me to press Quality Control into service to remove them from the scene.

The chocolate chippers were excellent. I used Alton Brown's recipe for "The Puffy" (easily findable at http://www.foodnetwork.com/), substituting butter for half of the shortening. I have to say, I am not a shortening gal -- I looooves me the real butter, as much of it as I can get. But every one of the all-butter chocolate chip cookie recipes I have tried result in a very flat, thin cookie (yes, even if I chill the dough first). I wanted something with a little more chew to it, and this recipe is a step in the right direction. (I cannot bring myself to make an all-shortening cookie, though -- one must draw the line somewhere.)

Next week we're baking the chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing and the applesauce spice bars from Dorie's book, and a granola/oatmeal/chocolate chip cookie from Rose Levey Berenbaum's Christmas cookie book. The applesauce spice bars have a caramel-y topping and get rave reviews from all who try them, so I'm psyched to try them out myself.

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Next up with the fundraising: tomorrow I'm being interviewed for a story in our local paper, which will hopefully result in increased traffic next week. The article will publish on Friday and I'll try to scan and post it for y'all. And we're having a massive garage sale toward the end of the month -- details to come!

I need more counter space.

Our fundraising plan grew like Topsy. It started off with a bake sale, which grew into a once-weekly baked goods and lemonade stand in front of our local Co-op (amongst other things). We start tomorrow. PANIC!

I spent July 4 mixing cookie batters and rolling out homemade dog biscuits. I cut over 100 dog biscuits with my cute little bone-shaped cutters.

My lovely and marvelous friend Maureen gave me a new rolling pin for my birthday last week, and I am in looooooooooove (with the pin, not Maureen, but Maureen does kick ass, plus she's a redhead, so it's a close call). I own 3 or 4 rolling pins, but the Kitchen Aid silicone non-stick has won my heart. Nothing sticks to this baby.

So tonight I'm madly scooping batter onto pans, reusing parchment paper so I feel virtuous, and I realize about mid-way through that I have fewer cookies than I thought I would -- by about half. I was super-sizing the cookies, which I don't usually do, so my counts had been pure guesswork. As a result I've spent the evening alternately convinced that I'm not going have nearly enough cookies and that we're only going to sell 3 and have to bring the rest home.

(For the record: we are going in armed with 16 jumbo sugar cookies, 25 jumbo chocolate chip cookies, and 27 normal-sized peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies.) These puppies were scooped with a standard-sized icecream scoop.

The peanut butter cookies were scooped with my medium-sized disher -- the one I use for most home-baked cookies.

That is to say, most of them were scooped with my medium disher. Then this happened:

But, on the bright side, I came through the evening without a single oven burn. All that was left was to get through quality control:

I hope we sell a lot of cookies tomorrow.