all about the baking...

...that's this weekend in a nutshell. Both days were devoted to baking, with a little decorating and crafting thrown in for good measure.

Saturday was cookie day...I didn't leave the house at all. I had already baked 225 cookies by Saturday morning, so I had a head start. I started off by baking the rest of the already-made dough. Then I made the spritz cookies and some lime zingers. By the end of Saturday, I had baked 9 different kinds of cookies; add that to the 3 kinds I had already made, and you have 12 kinds of cookies!

Sunday was biscotti day, after my normal grocery store run. I put dinner in the crockpot and got started on the biscotti. Biscotti are not hard to make, but they are time-consuming. And with my oven being its flaky self (I set the temperature to 325F...the actual temperature varies between 275-385F without me touching the dial!), I have to watch them carefully. I ended up having some extra butter, so I made another cookie recipe while I waited for the biscotti. By last night, I had baked 5 kinds of biscotti and 1 extra cookie batch.

By the end of the weekend, I had baked all of the cookies I needed and most of the biscotti. The totals? about 950 cookies and 329 biscotti (plus about 20 cups of Amaretto and Grand Marnier nuts):

I know, it doesn't look like that much! I still have to frost the sugar cookies and put chocolate on the biscotti, so I'm not quite done with them yet. But I'm close! I still need to make the truffles and the bark, but I can do that during the week.

What I haven't done yet is send out any Christmas cards (or even write my Christmas letter). I'm just going to resign myself to sending them out late this year. The most important thing is to finish the baking so I can give my co-workers their goodies on Friday. I'm on vacation after that, so I can worry about cards then.

Oh, and I did work on the secret project a little. I'm getting closer to done, but not there yet!