Thoughts of the week, plus wedding plans

This past Monday at the market went well again. I sold most of what I took—I only ended up with one pack of oatmeal cookies, two packs of brownies, and one pie. The pie will come in handy because I'm on dessert duty for a family picnic this weekend, so I just stuck that bugger in the freezer as soon as I got home. It won't be as wonderful as freshly made, as the textures will change from being in the heat and then frozen and thawed, but it will save me from having to bake another one. It will still taste good!


Most of my regulars stopped again this week, and that makes me so happy that they keep coming back. I'd bet that almost 90% of my sales this week were from repeat customers. I think that is one thing that can be a downside at the market is that there are probably not a lot of new customers stopping by each week to the market in general, not just my booth. I think the crowd is often the same crowd, and I would guess that after a while, some of them are going to get tired of eating my baked goods. I hope I'm wrong.


The market is not open on July Fourth, so I get a week off (more on that below). But I think for the week we're back, I'm not going to make my oatmeal cookies or my brownies. This past week, neither of them sold. I only had 3 packs of oatmeal, and I sold one. I ended up giving one away to the sweet Amish girl who gave me a loaf of bread at the end of the night. And the brownies—I only sold one pack, and the heat wasn't even that bad on Monday, but it still totally melted and steamed up the other two packs, making them look terribly unappetizing (although I was happy to see that the competition's cookies did the same thing).


Last night, I hosted my HappyJack Chat at the Whitehall Library. It went very well. I don't think everyone showed up that signed up, but I still had maybe 10 or 12 people. They all enjoyed it very much, and loved the samples I had at the end of the demonstration. Maybe there's another career in there for me somewhere!


So since I have this weekend off from baking for the market, I am going to start preparing for the two July weddings for which I'm making cookies. It's pretty overwhelming how many batches of cookies I need to make, but I have no doubt that I'll get through it all this weekend. My plan is to make all of the dough this weekend, and then bake it all the week before the first wedding (one is on July 23, and the other July 30). I'll be refrigerating and/or freezing the dough from now until then. In addition to making dough for the two weddings, I also have to make dough for the farmer's market on August 1. We're going on vacation around the time of the weddings, too, so I won't have time upon return from vacation to make dough and bake cookies in time for August 1. I figured if I at least get the dough done now, since I'm making loads of dough anyway, it will give me a leg up on July 31.


In a nutshell, my July Fourth plans are to make cookie dough, clean the house, and visit with family. It will be a crazy weekend. I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend with your family as well. Until next time..... have a yummy day!