Last year, my mom, my sister and I spent an entire day baking. It was a lot of fun and we had a lot of cookies when we were done. We decided to do it again this year, but we decided to get started early. So at 8 AM we gathered at my mom’s house to get started.

This is my mom and my sister. See the nice clean kitchen behind them? It didn’t stay like this for very long. After I took this picture we got started. We had three Kitchen Aids running pretty much the whole day. We each came prepared to make 4 different things. The oven came on at 8 AM and stayed on the whole day. We took a small break for lunch. My sister brought us a meat and cheese plate. We sat down for 30 minutes to enjoy that, but then got right back to work.

Here is picture I snapped at lunch break. The nice, clean kitchen is now long gone.

You know the worst part about baking all day? Cleaning it up. Every time I switched recipes everything had to be cleaned. It is kind of a bummer.  The end product is worth it.

We are finished. We are smiling, but we are tired. At this point, the thought of ingesting any of our bounty was not appealing.

A close up of the finished product. We have Kiss cookies, Spritz cookies, Peanut Butter Balls, Cookie Dough Truffles, Vanilla Bark, and Gum Drop cookies to name a few. We used at least 6 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of flour, probably 4 pounds of chocolate, and over 7 pounds of sugar.

We went out for dinner after we packed up all the snacks. The thought of cooking anything else sent shivers down our backs. Will we do this again next year? You bet. But, I think I am going to throw out the idea of hiring a clean up crew.