A friend of mine is hosting an inauguration party tonight for 150 people and she asked if I would be interested in supplying the baked goods. Seeing as how I had plenty of time to bake (I had last Friday off from work as part of my regular work schedule, as well as the weekend, Martin Luther King Jr. day, and today, which is a holiday for all D.C. federal employees), I thought, why not?
In sketching out my baking plans for the party, I figured that I needed to supply at least three baked goods a person, and I proposed an assortment that didn't include very many cookies. It's generally a lot more efficient to make a few pans of bars than to make an equivalent number of servings of cookies, and besides, I didn't want to spend the entire weekend squeezing dough out of cookie scoops. I was recently diagnosed with carpal tunnel in both wrists, and the repetitive motion of releasing dough from a scoop causes a lot of wrist strain.
The original baked goods plan included biscotti, which I make pretty regularly, and which can be made far in advance without any compromise in taste or texture. However, I made the unfortunate decision to try out some new biscotti recipes, and after three disastrous attempts (trying one recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours, and two different recipes from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion), I decided that biscotti just wasn't in the cards and I moved on.
The final cookie count for the party was thirteen dozen, consisting of Chocolate Chip Cookies, Spice Sugar Cookies, and Peanut Butter Cookies with Chocolate Chunks (I always bake with Skippy, which is not implicated in the current FDA warning on peanut butter and salmonella). In retrospect, I probably should have picked some cookies that were a little more varied in appearance, as these all had the same general color scheme and looked pretty similar... But at least I had some interesting bars and cupcakes to throw into the overall baked goods mix. More on those in the posts to follow!
Recipes:
In sketching out my baking plans for the party, I figured that I needed to supply at least three baked goods a person, and I proposed an assortment that didn't include very many cookies. It's generally a lot more efficient to make a few pans of bars than to make an equivalent number of servings of cookies, and besides, I didn't want to spend the entire weekend squeezing dough out of cookie scoops. I was recently diagnosed with carpal tunnel in both wrists, and the repetitive motion of releasing dough from a scoop causes a lot of wrist strain.
The original baked goods plan included biscotti, which I make pretty regularly, and which can be made far in advance without any compromise in taste or texture. However, I made the unfortunate decision to try out some new biscotti recipes, and after three disastrous attempts (trying one recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours, and two different recipes from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion), I decided that biscotti just wasn't in the cards and I moved on.
The final cookie count for the party was thirteen dozen, consisting of Chocolate Chip Cookies, Spice Sugar Cookies, and Peanut Butter Cookies with Chocolate Chunks (I always bake with Skippy, which is not implicated in the current FDA warning on peanut butter and salmonella). In retrospect, I probably should have picked some cookies that were a little more varied in appearance, as these all had the same general color scheme and looked pretty similar... But at least I had some interesting bars and cupcakes to throw into the overall baked goods mix. More on those in the posts to follow!
Recipes:
- Chocolate Chip Cookies from the New York Times, July 9, 2008.
- Spice Sugar Cookies from epicurious.com.
- Peanut Butter Cookies With Chocolate Chunks from epicurious.com.
- "Measuring Up the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie," July 11, 2008.
- "A Cookie Quest," July 29, 2008.
- "A Baking Beauty Secret," June 15, 2008.
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