Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Baker's Man

The kitchen in my apartment was not designed for anyone to do any serious cooking or baking, but I didn't let that stop me. After a false start Friday night (I had to stop because my mixer blew up), I spent all day baking on Saturday. When the flour dust finally settled, I had 80 gingerbread stars, 74 shortbread Christmas trees, about 40 chocolate chip cookies and a sheet of toffee. And then, because that didn't leave me exhausted enough, I packaged them into about a dozen boxes and tied them up with a pretty little bow. Of course, then my OCD took over and I had to mop the floor because I could feel the little crumbs of sugar beneath my feet. My grandmother always had dozens of different kinds of cookies at Christmas and never broke a sweat; the whole process left me completely stressed out! The good thing about all of this baking is that I was too tired to do any eating. If the cookies had been made for me, I'd have eaten a plateful. But since I made them myself, I only sampled one to make sure they were edible before passing them along to my friends.