Today, I'm switching it up a bit and writing a post on my recent experience in doing an order for 144 chocolate chip cookies! It was for 9 open houses for Janet Rathbun and Jenny Matches at the A-Team. That's right you heard it correctly, 144 COOKIES!! But what's even crazier is the fact that I made 296 COOKIES, to get the perfect 144 cookies for the order, which as totally excessive and unnecessary but that's where my perfectionism comes in I suppose haha. Also, if you've baked before you know that there are always a few cookies every batch that don't work out or sometimes entire batches. It was really interesting because some batches such as the first two batches turned out amazing but then after that it went downhill a bit. At least for the next two batches and I'm still not sure why. Initially, I thought it might be due to the type of brown sugar I used in the varying batches. As I ran out of the best brown sugar and switched to Dark brown sugar for some of them but then when I tried to go back to the best brown sugar when trying to deduce the cause of the change in cookie colouration, to no avail it didn't change. Well, I mean it did the next batches after that turned out great but it was all trial and error and since I made so many cookies when I would pre lay them out on the tray and then try to reassemble them afterwards the colour would change, so again I had to change the formula.
Overall, the recipe turned out really well as my dad was the test subject during this process haha and the cookies were all pretty good taste wise it was more about the appearance, which is really important when doing an order rather than making them for yourself. But none the less, afterwards came packaging. I was really lucky and was able to find these cute little pre-made cellophane bags at Walmart that came in packs of 100 (although they were a bit pricey), made by Wilton. The night before I pre-labelled each of the bags with a sticker for the realtors and a smaller one on the back with my logo and website domain (with permission of course :), Janet was really sweet about it and actually insisted that I put a sticker on them with my website on it to promote, without me even asking, as I wasn't going to do it or ask, as I haven't done many large orders previously.) My parents were amazing in this process and helped me to make this possible with buying groceries and helping me pack the cookies after they were all ready to go.
It was a fun process but also tiring. To be honest, I'm not sure if I would do it again, as I ended up having to go to the massage therapist twice (which i'm very fortunate to be able to have access to and am privileged to have this access to the financial resources for this: thank you to Adryon at Legacies for healing my back, also my parents for funding this and supporting me along the way) as I threw out my back in the process and had difficulty sleeping, sitting, etc. and was generally in a lot of pain afterwards. Don't worry, I'm all better now and I have a history of back pain and pain in general, so it didn't come out of the blue. Also, we ended up using a ton of groceries, as I don't like to cheap out on ingredients: I'm talking like 1-1/3 giant bags of Hershey's chocolate chips from Costco size, 6 blocks of butter, 20-30cups of flour, etc. Which for a commercial operation is a typical day or even more but as a one person operation is a lot! It ended up taking about 10hrs in total to bake them all, and the rest were given to friends, family, and neighbours for enjoyment :) I thought about donating them to a shelter but in the past I've done this and its actually really difficult to find ones that will accept freshly made goods, as they aren't sure what's in it, as well as allergies, and keeping them fresh. Also, majority of them were downtown, which is a fairly long drive from where I was and I was on a time crunch with summer classes and all. I also learned during this process that I prefer baking for fun rather than as a job but I do still really appreciate the opportunity to be able to do this at least for once in my life, as I've only ever done a crazy amount of baking one other time when I made a ton of cupcakes for a school project (long story!).
Overall, this experience was amazing and its definitely one I won't forget! Thank you once again to Janet Rathbun and Jenny Matches at the A-Team for the opportunity to bake for your 9 open houses, as well as Ann for referring me for this opportunity, I am truly grateful!! Also, thank you once again to my parents for your continual support in all that I do, as well as Adryon for fixing my back! And thank you readers for reading this long winded post about my experience in baking all of these cookies, and for reading all of my other posts, I genuinely and truly appreciate each and every one of you! Thank you so much and until the next post, happy baking (I know its so corny but I just had to haha)!
P.S. The whole process went really smoothly with Janet and their whole team was very reliable and fast to respond, so thank you all for that! It makes the process so much easier and takes out some of the stress in the process. I really appreciate it :)
P.P.S. Please ignore my hair and clothing in the bottom left photo, as I wasn't originally planning on taking photos but it was the only one that demonstrated how many cookies I made. Although, it only captured 200 cookies and I wasn't able to show all 296 of them, that's how many there were. My parents did mention at the time that I should change into something else in case I ended up using it but I didn't think I would until Janet kindly asked if there was a photo they could use for their newsletter and social media. I figured since it would be displayed there anyways, might as well post it here, plus it's really small haha. Well depending on what kind of device you're using. I guess parents sometimes do know best like that song "Mother Knows Best" from Tangled haha. Also, as a side note, I looked it up and apparently it's P.P.S. not P.S.S. as the 'p' stands for post, which I suppose makes sense. Anyways that's all for now!
Here is the link to the recipe (this was also used in an older post, but I din't want to deviate with a new recipe on such a large order): allrecipes.com
