Here we are again, another week, another pivot. My grandma used to say, “If you want God to laugh, plan something.” I had again planned to make nutritious snacks for my kiddo to take to school, but that can wait for next week (fruit and cheese to the rescue again).
The best laid plans often go awry, and even though I have had this happen many times in my life, I still struggle to pivot when life throws the proverbial curveballs. I sometimes push myself so hard that I hardly sleep and the time pressure turns me into a person I really don’t like. This throws off everything else, my family’s well-being, nutrition, organization, and more, and leads to a cascade of dysregulation that just is not worth the small victory of sticking to the plan.
That same snarky grandma of mine also used to tell me not to “break my arm patting myself on the back.” Love and miss you Grammy, but this week I am going to pat myself on the back for honoring my capacity and pulling back from the “plan.”
I am sure some of you can identify with the term “raging perfectionist.” Well, I am a recovering raging perfectionist. In recent years, it has become apparent to me the amount of pain I cause myself with all the should-ing and have-tos, and I have been making a conscious effort to recognize these moments and pause to make space for choosing aligned actions.
Currently, all the little voices are telling me I should stick to the plan with school snacks because that’s what people want this time of year and I have to do something the algorithms will favor. F&$# that. Although it is a core value of mine to provide nutritious and delicious food for my daughter to thrive, and I am loving the process of writing this blog, generating ideas, recipes, and stories to match, that can wait while I attend to another matter that is dear to my heart.
This week’s core value is friendship and it is my honor to bake desserts in memory of my dear friends’ younger brother who passed away unexpectedly, leaving behind a devastated young family. His wife will now be navigating through this grief while raising 4 daughters without their dad. His older sisters are offering their support for their sister-in-law and nieces while navigating their own grief.
His sisters were once part of my inseparable group of friends. My family was broken and scattered in my pre-teen years, so I made my own family, affectionately referred to as the “6-pack.”
When I was just 16 years old, my mom became terminally ill, and in a matter of days, she was in a coma, my entire house was packed up, and I was on a plane back to Alaska to live with my sister so I didn’t get put into foster care. These women were also just 16 at the time, but they showed up (and so did their moms), helped me pack up everything we owned, came to the airport to see me off, took my calls on the good days and the bad, and so much more. Without them, my mother’s illness and death would have broken me.
Over the years, I have moved many times. It’s been over 15 years since I lived in the same state as the rest of the 6-pack, who all still live in California. Our contact has been reduced to Facebook updates, tags, and comments, with the occasional short visit when I am in town. Maintaining friendships is hard with distance and age and change and all the stuff that comes with adulting. But I will be damned if any of that keeps me from showing up fully with all the love I still hold for them.
The support of these women helped shape who I am today. Their love left a mark on me that will never fade, so here I am, baking as many cookies as I can carry onto a plane, and showing up even when it is hard, because that’s what feels right.
But how can I fit in mixing, shaping, baking, and packaging 200+ cookies when time is already short? School is out for Spring Break for my kiddo, along with all the extra-curricular activities and a huge routine shift. I am in the middle of pivoting and starting to work for a culinary school as a pastry chef instructor, and lots of other adulting balls in the air too. Albert Einstein once said, “Efficiency is intelligent laziness,” and I humbly agree.
This philosophy was especially important when I worked as the Executive Pastry Chef for a catering company. We would sometimes do small orders, but we specialized in corporate events, so 100+ servings was the norm, with the occasional 1000+ thrown in for good measure. Heck, parents night and culmination at the university we regularly catered events for was 3500+ servings. The kitchen in my current home is actually larger than the space I was working in there (thank goodness I had an industrial sized mixer and ovens), and the pastry department consisted of me and one part time assistant, so planning, efficiency, and organization were imperative.
The skills I gained managing the challenges of catering large events out of a small space I still use today when I have large orders to fulfill for my home-based cookie business. I am sharing them with you now in the hopes that your next big project can go smoothly and you have time to spare to treat yourself to your well deserved sleep. Put them to use during the upcoming holidays to bust out even more treats than normal and absolutely shower your loved ones with home-baked love.
Batch Baking like a Boss
- Start with a Plan – Failing to plan means planning to fail. An oldie but a goodie.
Do these steps either early in the day or even the day before you plan to bake. Heck, it’s never too early to start planning!
- Know your recipes. Make sure you understand the methods and ingredients involved.
- If you are baking multiple batches that contain allergens (especially nuts) or something allergen friendly (i.e. gluten free), make sure to keep these separate from other batches. I suggest mixing allergen friendly stuff first, and nut-based recipes last. In fact, I don’t even have all the stuff out at the same time to minimize contamination. I go through all these steps first for the allergen friendly, then the regular stuff, and mix the nut-containing recipes last.
- Make sure you have all the ingredients on hand. Save yourself the absolute frustration of being halfway through mixing a recipe and finding that you are out of something important.
- Gather your recipes and lay them out on the counter.
- Get enough bowls out to mise en place all of the recipes at the same time.
- If you don’t have enough bowls, you can use tupperware, or my favorite little deli containers, to measure ingredients that will later be transferred to a bowl for mixing.
- Label everything. Keep each bowl with its corresponding recipe so you don’t lose track.
2. Mise En Place – This term is French for “everything in its place” and is one of the fundamental lessons learned in a professional kitchen. It means, get your s%$* together before starting your mixing or cooking processes.
- For batch baking, label your bowls with tape and a Sharpie.
- Create abbreviations for yourself to make this even more efficient. For example, my Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies turn into simply “BBCC” when I am labeling them.
- Bonus points if you notate your abbreviation on the top of your recipe so you never lose track!
- Create abbreviations for yourself to make this even more efficient. For example, my Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies turn into simply “BBCC” when I am labeling them.
- Think like Henry Ford and make an assembly line.
- Nothing wrong with a bit of stacking if you are short on space.
- Start with dry ingredients to minimize mess and cross contamination with things like eggs.
- Measure a single ingredient into each recipe’s corresponding containers before moving onto the next ingredient. For example, when mixing multiple flavors of cookies back to back, start with the flour and scale it for each recipe before moving onto the next ingredient.
- The goal is to move as little as possible, which means as few times picking up and putting down tools. So that flour scoop shouldn’t leave your hand until all the flour is scaled for every recipe.
- Place your recipe into sheet protectors and use a dry erase marker to check things off as you go. This will keep you extra organized and ensure you don’t accidentally measure out something twice, or miss an ingredient all together.
- Do all the shared ingredients first. For this round of batch baking cookies, flour, salt, leaveners, eggs, vanilla, butter, and sugar will be used in everything, so get those done first before moving on to ingredients that are unique to a single recipe.
- Order Matters
- When mixing multiple items back to back, if you start with the most neutral-flavored variety, you can reuse the bowl and paddle or whisk with minimal cleanup.
- For example, this week I am mixing my Bakery Style Sugar Cookies, Snickerdoodles, Brown Butter Chocolate Chip, and Quadruple Chocolate Cookies. If I mix them in that order, the tiny bit of residue left after scraping the finished dough out of the bowl and off the paddle will not harm the next batch. This was something we did to keep the dishwashers happy (along with supplying them with a steady stream of treats).
- Again, pay attention to allergens and plan your mixing order accordingly (i.e. nut-based recipes go last).
4. Portioning, Baking, and Storage – This will depend on what you are batching out.
When space or equipment are short, get creative! Stack bowls of ingredients, stick to batching 2 recipes at a time, or use unconventional containers and surfaces. When working in catering, we would put sheet trays across the sink to create extra counter space, use 5 gallon buckets to mise en place our dry ingredients, and other slightly deranged, I mean innovative, means of making the space work for us.
a. Cookies
Wrap each batch in plastic and chill until you are done mixing all the batches.
Once done with the mixing stage for all batches, portion each batch and place onto sheet trays to chill until it is time to bake.
If you cure your dough overnight, flavor and texture is enhanced, so I recommend doing everything up until this stage on day 1, then baking on day 2.
Most cookie doughs freeze extremely well, so after your dough cures for 24 hours, freeze your portioned dough balls and bake them as needed from frozen. This means your bake time will be slightly longer (1-2 minutes typically).
b. Molded Baked Goods (i.e. cakes, cupcakes, muffins, quick breads, etc)
Portion and bake these as soon as you are done mixing them. You can allow them to rest on the counter for up to an hour if you are waiting for another batch to finish baking.
Once baked and cooled, you can wrap well and freeze for up to 3 months.
c. Breads
Batch baking bread takes a little more forethought due to the steps between mixing and baking.
If you decide to tackle this challenge, a time-blocked schedule is your friend. Make yourself a timeline with blocks for each recipe and try to make sure that active steps like mixing and shaping don’t overlap.
5. Pro Tips
This process can be adapted to many different tasks, even outside of the kitchen. I use this when building projects in my woodshop, creating stickers or vinyl projects on my Cricut, or even when planning content for this blog.
When batching out multiple recipes that are all different product types, these same principles are applied, but there is an added step of factoring in different cooking methods (i.e. baking vs. stovetop) and their corresponding cooling or rest periods. Take these into consideration when planning your production order.
Wishing you a chance to bake smarter, not harder, so you can sprinkle magic no matter what life throws at you!
