(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.
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.*********************************
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!
3 comments:
I traveled here via Cookstalk. Love what you are doing. Congratulations on the success.
A few months ago, during a thread on choc chip cookies, I got the hint to use cake flour in cookies instead of regular flour. I baked some this weekend with that substitution, and the cookies were not flat at all. However, I did use all crisco instead of using butter. Don't know the chemistry of how all butter and cake flour would do, but wanted to give you a heads up in case you do cookies again.
GenE
Ah, I didn't recognize you without your capital E on the end! Thanks for coming by.
I think that Criso v. butter is the biggest variable with regard to flat v. puffy cookies, though possibly upping the flour ratio might help. We will be doing plenty of experimenting this summer, so I'll report back.
Great job Ruth! I hope the word will spread and people will soon be forming lines to get their hands on your cookies. I'll definately be following your project.
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