So, I’m sure you’re asking yourself how in the heck one manages to accidentally make somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 dozen cookies, right?  I know I would be if I were you.

Look at all the cookies!

Mmm, cookies…om nom nom!

Bubbles and Miss Tadpole have a cookie walk tomorrow, and they are each responsible for providing ten dozen cookies.  That’s 20 dozen cookies (aka a whole freakin’ lot).  Last year they both helped with the baking and whatnot, but this year we’ve been so busy that it got left to the last minute.  Bubbles is sick, so he wasn’t cooking anything for anybody, and Miss Tadpole was at school on Tuesday (aka, the only time I had to do any baking whatsoever before tomorrow), so it was on me to get things done.

I flipped through the pages in my New Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook* and found a recipe for vanilla wafers.  I’ve never made my own vanilla wafers, but I figured that if they turned out better than last week’s ice cream cookies, then they couldn’t be all bad.  And the recipe said it yielded four to five dozen cookies, so I thought if I stretched it a bit, I could probably get ten dozen cookies out of a batch, and then I’d only need two batches.

I didn’t notice till I had the first batch of dough mixed that these were rolled cookies, not drop cookies, and that the dough needed to be chilled.  But, no big deal, I thought, I can just chill the first batch of dough while I mix up the second, then I can chill that batch while I get the first round of cookies cut and in the oven.

So I carried on that way.  The directions from the 4-H leader said silver dollar sized cookies, so ten dozen from each batch should be totally doable, right?

I ended up with all but eight of the 240 required cookies out of the first batch.

*le sigh*

Since I needed those eight extra cookies, I decided to just bake the rest of the dough along with it.  The plan was to make the rest of the cookies a bit bigger than silver dollar size, but I had a groove going, and they all ended up about the same size.  Which is to say, bite-size.  Also, they taste pretty darn good, which means that they’re really rather addictive because who doesn’t love bite-size cookies?

I failed to actually count how many cookies I got out of the second batch of cookie dough.  But I prepped plates of cookies for Seymour and me to take to work Wednesday.  His plate held two dozen cookies and mine held two and a half dozen.  Then there were the four dozen that we gifted his aunt and uncle with for watching the boys while I was under the knife, and the orange canister in the pictures that is full of cookies for us, in addition to the 20 dozen cookies the kids have to take to the cookie walk tomorrow.

So, I’m guessing around 50 dozen was the final count, although given the size of the cookies, I wonder if that might be a bit low.  But probably not.

And once I get that coffee cake baked for Sunday, I think I’m done baking for a while.

*I find the word “new” in the title of my cookbook rather ironic, given that I inherited said cookbook from my dad and it’s older than I am.  We have a newer version of that cookbook that is most definitely not older than me – it was a wedding gift, I think – but I like the older one better. 🙂

(c) 2014.  All rights reserved.