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.