Saideman's Semi-Spew: Winterfest 2024 Cookie Madness: Infinity War

Oh man, I went wildly overboard this year. In previous years, I realized:

a kitchen aid stand mixer makes things so much easier
gifts of cookie scoops makes things so much easier
one of my fave gifts of graduated cylinders/beakers from King Arthur makes it easy to measure the liquid ingredients.
using a kitchen scale (good idea, Steph) makes it far easier and more accurate to measure the dry stuff that goes into the cookies
cookies can be frozen so you can bake way ahead of time (3 months or so)
that my new kitchen is really optimized for max cookie production
that a chest freezer acquired for the purpose of storing the winterfest hoard of cookies is super helpful (and I did fill it this year, see the pic)
that I have a severe case of FOMO--I want to make all the recipes because I don't want to miss out on any
that Costco butter is about half the price of what I can get in supermarkets
that most importantly, while stress-baking is a very important part of getting through pandemics and other stressful times, and that eating cookies is joy, giving cookies away is heaps of joy.

So, yeah, I made something like 25 batches of cookies.... so many recipes and so many cookies that I am not really sure how many I made from October through to December. I do know that by the end of today I will have given cookie boxes of varying sizes to 28 people/households/gatherings including multiple Stef/Stephs, my family at Thanksgiving, the last sessions of my two classes this fall, both CDSN and NPSIA staffs, and a heap of friends around Ottawa. I spent yesterday driving around Ottawa delivering most of ten boxes, and I got to chat with most folks. Today, I venture out for three more deliveries. I will have enough leftover cookies for my in-laws and my daughter to snarf over the holidays as well as some in reserve for those who left town too early or were too sick or busy to receive them. And, yes, I keep a bunch handy for whenever a former defence minister has time to receive the cookies I owe her.

I get to meet an occasional dog,
which is a big bonus, when delivering

My key sources for recipes--the NYT recipes I downloaded before I dropped my subscription, King Arthur, Sally's Baking Addiction (great website and I received all of her books during previous winterfests), and a few others (I have received multiple cookie cookbooks as gifts and some of them are better than others). What is my decision rule for which recipes to make? Primarily: do I want to eat it? I don't bake stuff that I don't want to eat as a key ingredient (sorry) for this entire thing is I want to make cookies I want to eat. So, no peanut butter cookies. I also don't like nuts, which is helpful for making cookie boxes that don't produce allergic reactions. I generally try to make things that don't require a heap of difficult to get ingredients, and, yes, I prefer to make recipes that produce many cookies, which means I don't make many sandwich recipes. I got heaps of boxes to fill!

So, what did I make? Because I have a few more deliveries, I will first post the list and then put up a bunch of pics (I don't have pics of all as I kept forgetting--cookie madness is not good for the memory), no ranking this year as last year's holds up pretty well.

King Arthur:

Candied Ginger Shortbread
One of my sister's gave me a long set of
forceps (tweezers) for fancy cooking
a la The Bear, but it really came in handy
for the placing of googly eyes. Which,
yes, always make things better.
Peppermint sandwhich
Blondie (I had two blondie recipes and, so, yeah, I made both). I think I preferred KA.

Dorie (a new cookbook, and one that, alas, didn't really do it for me):

Fudge mocha
Double ginger molasses
Mocha-ricotta
Melody cookies

Sarah Kieffer (another new and much better cookbook)

Oatmeal Raisin
Chocolate chip cookie
Blondies
I have always sucked at arts and crafts, but
I am learning to frost better and more quickly
thanks to Steph's encouragement and gifts of
some frosting tools.
Palmiers (tasty but I messed up the puffed pastry)

NYT

Marshmallow Surprise
Gochuchang Carmel (spicy)
Peppermint brownie--Mrs. Spew's fave
Maple Brown Sugar
Grammy's Spice--the best
Gingerbread Brownies
Black and White

Smitten

Thick Molasses
Brownie rollout

Sally's

Sparkling sugar
Brown butter snickerdoodles--the very best-est
Butter spritz--made with a cookie gun, which I got in a previous winterfest (I have many enablers)
Cookies and cream--involves oreos.
Chocolate crinkle
Snowballs

I may have missed one or two. It has been a very sweet fall--lots of sugar and butter.

And here are the pics of many of the cookies I made: