This week: a special peek into all the planning that goes into Cookie Extravaganza! There are lists, there are spreadsheets, there’s a mega calendar. Data and baking nerds, this one’s for you.
I’m sipping on Russian Caravan from Upton Tea Imports.
You can check out this year’s Bake From Scratch Holiday Cookies issue here.
I wrote a bit more about Cookie Extravaganza last December.
I’ll start baking in December, and you can follow along on Instagram! And if you’re curious, I took pictures of every cookie I baked last year.
Thanks for watching!
I’m still learning how to make subtitles! Here’s the transcript for the screen recording, which, for some reason, I couldn’t automatically transcribe:
So, of course there’s a spreadsheet, because there’s a spreadsheet for everything I do. First, what I do is go through all my cookbooks, go through a bunch of blogs, make a list of all the cookies I might want to make, and then I narrow it down.
And this is the narrowest down list. This is where I put all of the information that I use to make my calendar: the name of the cookie, where it comes from, how many are in a batch, and then, the two really important pieces are these ones–the dough chill, and how long it lasts.
Some doughs I can make a day in advance, some I can make a week in advance. A lot I make and then freeze unbaked. So when I’m putting together the calendar I’ll sort this list by this column and then figure out where things go in the calendar based on whether I’m chilling the dough, freezing the dough, or making it the day of.
Then, this is the same, this ‘lasts how long’ column is a rough estimation of how long the cookies will last. So some, as you can see–14 days–lasts a while. Some last a very long time, this one, two months, there are a few I make that last even longer than that. And there are some of course, that are shorter—this one is a 3-day. So when I’m making the calendar I take that into account and make the longer-lasting ones sooner and the shorter-lasting ones last.
Here’s a quick little preview of my list for this year, with all the different kinds of cookies and the different information. This year I have a list of 65 types, and the next step is putting all of this information into a calendar.
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