Christmas takes a lot more everything than anyone actually plans for. It's annoying. Even more annoying is that my oven decided to die literally mid-cookie-bake. I had a pan of Hawaiian Butter Mochi in it, along with a tray of gluten-free almond sugar cookies, and the oven lost heat enough that neither actually finished baking. I had to get everything baked up in my tiny toaster oven, which I actually have the oven version of that because it's so much more useful than a pop-up toaster. It was annoying, but that was my option.
Since that's been on my mind a lot recently, I've got two things for amusement here. Well, one recent story and what I think of it.
The story first, is that there was a thing done in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recently with 83,000 cookies put together in a cookie swap, to try to break a world record. I'm not entirely certain what record was attempted to be broken, or who with, but...well, it's a pretty big event. 83,427 cookies to be more exact, baked by 583 bakers in 67 teams from 14 states and New Zealand. They provided evidence for the Guinness book of world records in hopes that they could get the record for the largest cookies swap.
This is...an interesting story. It involves a lot of people and moving parts and could be very impressive sounding.
Except...well, I'm me.
I'm not particularly religious, but I do have affiliations with a church that I've been going to at least twice a year for my entire life. It used to be a lot more, but lately, I can only guarantee two days that I'd be there, and now I'm not even sure about that. The first day was the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Feed that my family put together because my brother makes the best pancakes. The other was the Cookie Faire in December, but apparently the Health Department says that a bake-sale type thing is no longer allowed because there's too much risk that someone could get sick and blame the church or a baker. To keep this even vaguely child-friendly, I'm going to skip entirely over my opinion of that and those people.
The Cookie Faire was something that my Church put together every December, for the community. We'd bake up all sorts of cookies and homemade candies and donate them, then people would come in and pick out their favorites from the selection to put in their personal boxes. We sold them by the pound, cookies 6 dollars a pound and candy 8, then we'd donate all the money to the local food bank.
This is the part where I'm really not impressed by that 80,000 cookie count.
The last time we were able to put that on before the Health Department got too upset about it, I baked about 15,000 cookies for it, of 60 different types. I also made about two dozen different kinds of candy. In my home kitchen, over the course of a month, a few hours a day most days. They'd get made, then put into a freezer until the day of. The list of planned bakes for me was three pages long, single space, over 100 planned cookie types. Most of them I made about 200 of.
So, if I want to challenge that, I just need about 6-7 people as enthused about it as me, and a lot of people to come eat them. The number of people they had there, they could have just baked 100 apiece and gotten there pretty easily. I can do that in less than two hours, if you don't count frosting them. 67 teams, yeah, one days work for each of them and all's good.
This boils down to: Very impressive act.
Hold My Beer.
Sources:
Go look it up yourself. Pittsburgh, 80,000 cookies, world record.
P.S. Might not actually try to break their record, just giving it some serious consideration to try.
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