Well, I'm almost a week behind schedule, but I figured I'd try to catch you up on what's been going on anyway.
This past Monday's market was beautiful. The weather was as lovely as lovely could be. The sun was shining most of the time, and the temperature was somewhere in the 70s. It was perfect. Everyone else must have thought so, too, because I swear there were more people this week than last week. But the weird thing is that my sales were down. I don't get that, but who understands the buying trends of consumers anyway? It's so darn unpredictable, it's not even worth predicting sometimes. For instance, in the first week, I sold about 86 units (a unit is a pie, a happyjack, or a 6-pack of cookies), and I didn't think the market was very crowded. In the second week, I sold about 61 units, yet the market seemed much busier. So if you were me, how much stuff would you make for week 3? Well, I'm counting on the 61 being more of an average, so that's the number I'm aiming for. We'll see if I was right. Oh, and this coming week, I'm going to offer my A-maize-ingly Lime Cookies as my 50¢ cookie of the week. Come and give them a try if you haven't had them before. They're delicious!
At the market this past week, I purchased some butter lettuce and nectarines. I was bummed that the nectarines weren't very sweet. They had the right texture and reached the right ripeness in about a day, but the flavor was very bland. The butter lettuce was fine, and a nice add-in for my lunch salads where I also use spinach, shredded carrots, and grape tomatoes. Anyway, I also splurged and bought a piece of fudge. Dang, it was delicious. Peanut butter and chocolate fudge all in one bar. Pure heaven. I tried to just eat a few bites, but soon found myself having eaten the entire thing. For dinner, we opted to just get sandwiches at Subway. While I love the food at the market, it's more fattening than I was in the mood for that night, so we went with the chain restaurant instead. I felt like such a traitor.
And that bread I bought at Loafer's last week? It's STILL good! I don't understand how it hasn't gotten moldy yet, but it hasn't. And there's no preservatives in that stuff. Weird.
In preparation for week 3, I started making cookie dough on Thursday. I then refrigerated what I made, and baked some of it Friday evening, and baked the rest of it today. Although, the good news is that I made a lot of extra dough, and some of it I even already shaped into balls and put back in the freezer so that next week, I might not have any dough to worry about making... just baking. So that could save me a lot of time in the kitchen.
I had a weird thing, happen, though, with my refrigerated dough from Thursday. My chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies both turned out kind of flat this week. I have to do some research to see what could have caused this. Maybe my baking soda suddenly lost it's oomph? It's weird, though, because I've refrigerated or frozen dough before without incident. So what was different this time? I like a good challenge, so I'm hopeful I'll figure out what went wrong. The cookies all still taste good; they're just not exactly what I would have liked them to be.
So that's about all I have for this week. Tune in next time for another exciting adventure in the world of HappyJack Bakery (end sarcasm).
Oh, and one more thing—I'll be doing a baking demonstration at the Whitehall Public Library next Wednesday, June 29, at 7:00 pm. I'm going to show how to make my award-winning Chocolate Chip Snowballs, and a strawberry pie. Hope to see you there! Or at the farmer's market!
Until next time...have a yummy day!
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