There were cookies at Minicon

[lizvogel]

I am bad at journal-posting.

About a month ago, I went to Minicon, where I hosted a room party 2 nights running for Narrativity. This was the first ever room party I'd run, so of course it was a learning experience; among the things I learned is that a room party should *not* be a one-person undertaking!

Mainly I'm posting this, a month after the fact, to document the cookies for myself, because I am about to start making cookies for Narrativity, and data is useful.

So: The room party got 2 batches of dough, which made ~173 cookies of varying sizes, including
27 clocks
22 hats
34 grins
15 spades
22 clubs
12 hearts
11 diamonds
30 carrots (the Saturday was International Carrot Day)
...and half a dozen or so quality control samples. ;-)

That was about double what was actually needed; I ended up bringing about half of them home.

Timing, done in Cabin Pressure eps (~28-30 minutes each)
dough: 4 eps (2 hrs)
baking: 7 eps (3.5 hrs)
decorating: 4+4+8+10+8+2 = 36 eps (18 hrs)
     plus 2 eps (1 hr) redoing the grins, that came out less Cheshire Cat and more terrifying vampire
pics and packing: 3 eps (1.5 hrs)

...for a total of about 26 hours.

For Narrativity, I've got 4 batches of dough chilling in the fridge, one of which is for emergency backup purposes *only*. (I decided on this after discovering, the hard way, that the old eggs were not good anymore. Ick-eww. Luckily we had new eggs on hand.) Three batches of dough really should be plenty; I don't want to bring cookies home this year.

So three batches of dough should equal roughly 40 hours, maybe a bit more as there'll be more designs to change between. And people wonder why I don't make cookies for a living. Looking back, it seems that last year's cookies took 41 hours, and I only decorated about half of 3 batches. So bugger, it's gonna be a long time.

Comments

[cat_paw]

Your cookies are awesome though. An idea for the future, I have a stand mixer you could borrow for mixing dough. The more the merrier.

And if you were to go pro, there are dough sheeters (sooo a reason to get a new tool).

[lizvogel]

Thanks! But it's the decoration that really takes the time, and there's no way to shorten that; the whole point is that each cookie is a tiny, unique, edible work of art. I could speed that up by making them simpler/more generic, but then they'd just be ordinary sugar cookies -- tasty, but no big deal.