what day is it?

I'm beat. Tired. Sleepy. And how many days til Christmas? This year I convinced some of my family that we should make gifts for each other. What in the heck was I thinking? The only thing I have the time to make is a "to-go" box of the left overs from things we made in class that no one else took home. Ohhhh man, it is going to be a soggy, mushy, mixed up Christmas for some of my family! Actually... that just led me to a brilliant idea for gifts... but I'm not telling... because besides Tisra & Candie I think the only people that read this thing are my family...

I have 2 papers, one presentation and one final, all in the next 9 days of school. Oh, and a dinner tomorrow with my fellow Baking & Pastry kitchen-mates and a holiday soiree/potluck with the Culinary Management crew the following Thursday.

One of my papers is on cookies and the other is on milk. An appropriate combination by many standards. The paper that I should be writing (right now, instead of typing this) was an 8 batch experiment/study on peanut butter cookies. I chose a recipe from my Baking & Pastry text/cookbook, cut it in half and then did 7 versions of that, plus a recipe from America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. The experiment was really fun. And some real results came out of it. But I swear if I never see another peanut butter cookie again for the rest of my life it might be okay. The milk paper is a study in the specifications of milk. I wrote specs at my last job for code that I designed to run programs. I didn't realize that milk could have a spec sheet until we started talking about ordering procedures and food production in culinary management.

Anyway, here is a quick photo of the fruits of my labor from this past weekend - baking 8 batches of peanut butter cookies!