Ah, the sweetness!

I organized a cookie swap at work. I have no idea what got into me but 2 weeks ago I started pummeling our faculty with emails to see who wanted to be involved. By the deadline, there were 8 of us, which includes me.

The general concept is that each person in the swap would bake 1 sort of cookie. And they would bake 1 dozen of that type and give 1 dozen to each person... for those of you who don't know how a swap works. Then we all bring them together and we each get to leave with 1 dozen of seven types of cookies, in my case 7 since there were seven other people other than me.

So today was the big day for the cookie swap.

Well, I have to have that one secretary bowed out at the last minute, with good reason. Last night she went home to bake ans discovered her husband had dumped all her wheat flour and her white flour together in ONE CONTAINER. She lives in the country, about 20 minutes from a grocery store but her son lives in his own house on their farm property and her daughter lives 2 miles away down the road. So she called her daughter and borrowed the flour from her. Her next hurdle was that her husband also froze ALL their eggs. So she called her kids and managed to get enough eggs except for 2 and she had to use frozen ones. While she keeps running to her kids homes, she discovers her house is getting hotter and hotter.l Well, he husband was messing with their wood stove settings and by the time she could actually start baking it was 90 degrees in her house. And the butter she had in a bowl had completely melted. So the dough wouldn't hold together. She decided to just put the dough in the fridge overnight and got up at 4am this morning to bake. And when she did all cookies crumbled and couldn't rise- they were flat as pancakes. Then she decided screw it and she would buy cookies at the store. She had no cash on her except for a 100 dollar bill that her husband didn't have the bank teller break smaller. The grocery store she went to this morning at 7am didn't have change for a $100. So she said to hell with the cookie swap. And after all that we all felt sorry for her- wouldn't you????- and gave her cookies anyway!

Other than that mess and that one teacher made her grandmother's cookies and was up until 1 am (though she said baking is much more fun since she was drinking Blue Moon Winter ale) and that I ran out of butter in the middle and had to go to Wal-Mart in the middle of baking, at 8pm, in a deluge, all went smoothly. (Oh, I made Tea Cake Surprises- a dough cookie with a Hershey Kiss inside of it and then rolled in powdered sugar!)

So, we swapped cookies. I came home with a dozen of each of the following: Black Forest Cookies (cherry and chocolate cookies), cut out sugar cookies with frosting and sprinkles, Peanut Butter Blossoms (peanut butter cookies with a Hershey Kiss on the top), haystacks (Chow Mein Noodles covered in dark chocolate), fudge, and Pretzel turtles (pretzels with a Rolo Candy melted on the top and then a pecan set on it as the Rolo melted).

If you read my Twitter feed then you know that none of us here at home liked the haystacks and Daddy-O actually took them out for the birds. Everything else is YUMMERS!!!!!!

Here's the loot:


Wonder if I could convince people to do a cookie swap once a quarter????

Settling in for a sugar high,
Maggie