Cookie Production Part 1

Once a year, my mother in law goes a bit batty and cooks about 8,000 cookies in a couple of weeks. No, seriously, she make 420 - 450 tins of 35 cookies and sells them during the holidays for $20 a tin. She does the 60km Walk To End Women's Cancer with another family member each year and the target is to raise $2,000 each. So Mona gets her fundraising done early.




She usually starts the last week of November. She bakes small batches on weeknights, but on the weekend, total war breaks out in Cuchina del Mona. She never has trouble finding people to help her out and speed up the process. She makes dough and cuts the cookies while the help loads the oven with two trays at a time and starts the ten minute timer. When it dings, we have to switch the trays up for down in the oven to help with the evenness of the cooking, then run to the dinning room, take the cooling batch off the trays and stack them in rows on the table, then run back to the kitchen, wipe the trays, reload them with 70 cookies, take a small sherry glass and tap a design on the top of each cookie and have that all done before the timer finishes it's 10 minute trek. And that is the easy job compared to mixing the dough, rolling it out and cutting the cookies.



Then its back to the dinning room and start loading fully cooled cookies into the wax lined tins, placing a wax cutout on top with a thank you card, snapping them shut and stacking them in large boxes of twenty tins. When a box is full we place a call in to the shipping department (my father in law downstairs) and it is picked up for distribution. This process goes on for about two and a half to three weeks. It seems every year the orders push the output number up a little more. But hey, who doesn't love shortbread?