Cookie Platter and Learning Adventures

Saturday night I attended a charity event for the Springville-Griffith Community Education Foundation, Inc where money was raised to purchase a new mammography machine for the local hospital. The event had a great turnout -- between 300 and 400 guests, and it was packed! The cookie tray I made was a success (once out of the kitchen -- more on that later). I stealthily stood within viewing distance of my platter to see who (if anyone!) was bidding on my platter. I saw many people checking it out, a couple bending over to write down their price, and a very nice looking older gentleman took my business card! He stuck it right into his breast pocket after showing it to his wife and thoroughly investigating the platter and card. In the end, most of my business cards had been scarfed up, and the last I saw the highest bid was $40. Not too shabby for my first cookie platter!

Let me tell you though -- the going was not full of sunshine and daisies. Well, it was up to a certain point. Mom and I got up early and we were ready to go! We donned our aprons, tied our hair back, and started pulling ingredients from the cupboards. Mom cleaned up our work surfaces while I started making the Spiced Almond Wafer batter.
                                                                                              

Dark brown sugar, butter, eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.

Once this batch was completed I made another -- Dutch Nutmeg Cookies, and mom whipped up the Banana Oatmeal Cookies and the Chocolate Chunk and Cherry Cookies. We were in excellent shape. And then we started baking. And that is when things started to go wrong. The damn oven was too hot. When put on the lower racks of the oven the bottoms of the cookies burned leaving the tops raw. So the bottom rack was out of the question -- leaving one rack to use -- with multiple trays of cookies per batch. No matter how much we tried the cookies seemed to be near burned on the bottom and not quite done in middle -- even when closest to the top burner! GAH! I wanted to pull my hair out! That said, there were only a few cookies in each batch that I would allow to be put on the platter. You cannot give away (especially when someone is paying for it) burned and underdone cookies. It worked out though because we had just enough of everything. And the final product was quite pretty. And I must say, the peanut brittle was my absolute favorite! It was sooo simple to make, and it turned out beautifully. 

Overall, the baking and the event turned out to be a great success. Mom and I learned how well we work together in the kitchen, and to let the cookies tell us when they're not done, burned, and to not listen to the oven. Fucker.