I can finally crawl out of the kitchen for just a moment. I swear, I’ve been tied to both the kitchen and my oven since early Friday morning.

I was working on an order of 230 cookies for pageant gifts, and it was so very time-consuming. Altogether, my tally sheet looks like this:

– 18 sheets of dough (9 batches)
– 80 rollouts (each time I rolled out and re-rolled scraps)
– 39 bakings at 12 minutes each (six cookies to a sheet)
– 4 batches of royal icing
– two very, very exhausted hands

I’m very pleased with the final results, though. It was such a relief this morning to bag up these cookies and reclaim some space in my dining room, bar, and kitchen! Tonight, I’ll tie up tags onto the bags (dropped off by the little girl’s mother), and then I’ll pack these into shipping boxes tomorrow morning. These cookies will be mailed down to Arizona for the Worlds competition of “Little Miss La Petite,” and I wish Abigail the very best of luck!

In case you’re curious as to how MANY cookies 230 really, really is, here are several more pictures from the process.

Outlines and flooding.

Many, many times I thought these cookies resembled little castles while I was piping outlines. 🙂

Fully flooded cookie.

Cookies on the bar…

Cookies in the kitchen…

And cookies all over the dining room table.

Packaged cookie for the pageant gift.

Now, I’m off again to finish up two more sets of cookies I began today. After the fourth straight day of cookies, I’ll be asleep before my head hits the pillow tonight!