As I may have mentioned before,  I’m not good at baking in moderation.  My friend Laura sometimes bakes a batch of cookies after dinner, and I mean, who has time for that?  Just finish dinner, and bake a batch of cookies?  No.  Once a year, I bake 17 dozen cookies.  It takes a month of preparation, weeks of baking, days of decorating, minutes of eating, and so on.  Then I take 10.5 months off.  Or, I volunteer to bring in pancakes for Luke’s class and the day before they say, “Thanks, be here at 7:00 am, there are 60 kids.”  What?  I was going to send 20 pancakes in a ziplock bag.

When Luke was in kindergarten, I was overcompensating for not being a stay at home mom, and I made elaborate cupcakes for his class.  But as you all know, Luke really prefers pie to anything else, and a while ago I saw a recipe for hand pies, and then I thought, “Why not make tiny individual pies for all the kids in Luke’s class this year?”  I bet lots of people could think of reasons not to do that, but before I could come to my sense, Luke’s friends were saying things like, “Only 30 days until we all get pie!”  and it was too late to back out.

Have I mentioned the 10 stages of excessive baking?

1.) Announcing my grand plan

2.) Planning, browsing blog posts, imagining an extremely large group of people being delighted my beautiful pastries.

3.) Kind of wishing I hadn’t ever said anything about anything related to baking some crazy dessert

4.) Actually planning, deciding on a recipe, shopping without a list

5.) False start, realizing I don’t have all the ingredients I need

6.) Second trip to the grocery store

7.) Making the dough that needs to chill for some period of time

8.) Worrying that I won’t have enough/procrastinating

9.) Making the dessert, making extra just in case

10.) Having way too much of a dessert that tastes fine, and looks ok.

I’m sure you can guess where I am now, with 30 hours left to go.  Dough is in the fridge, and there probably isn’t enough!