Sweet Hope Cookies

January 27, 2011

For the past three days I’ve been in the kitchen. In those three days I’ve mixed, rolled, cut, baked and decorated six batches of cookie dough. Actually it was eight batches of cookie dough in total if I count the double batch I had to make to replace the cookies I sent careening across the floor when the full force of my body weight moving in a forward motion collided with a non-moving four-tier stack of baked cookies that were cooling. That’s the way the cookie crumbles indeed! More like disintegrates. And no, I didn’t take a picture for your entertainment value but only because I’ve found it next to impossible to hold a camera still when screaming.

So I know it was only a couple weeks ago when I said I was going to take a couple months off from baking but….well….don’t good intentions count for anything anymore?! I really had meant to refrain from being alone with only my standing mixer, a silo of sugar, and enough cubes of butter to grease a pig farm, but then I had an idea. And this is where everyone who knows how I am mutter a collective “She had an idea? Uh-oh.” Get it out of your system. I’ll wait.

So here’s the idea. Take the thing I love doing (baking) and use it to raise money to fight the thing I hate the most (ALS), and so that’s what I’ve decided to do and that’s why I’ve been in the kitchen all week. I’m starting up a little venture called “Sweet Hope Cookies.” I’ll be taking LOCAL orders to make home made, hand decorated cookies for any occasion (and you already know I have at least one cookie cutter for just about any day of the year and then some) and 100% of the proceeds will be donated to The ALS Association. I’m donating my time and vats of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs so that all the money that comes in will go toward advancing medical research and to providing immediate support to those living with ALS by making additional resources available for their physical and emotional care. What I’ve come to learn over the last year is that there are a thousand and one gadgets, devices, medications, and treatments not covered by insurance that are desperately needed by an ALS patient and their family to cope with the progressive physical losses that end up up transforming even the most basic day to day tasks into a personal Mt. Everest. Watching the progression of ALS in the life of my brother has been devastating to all of us who love him but even in the most overwhelming moments there’s a sense of profound gratitude that at the very least Randy has the means to access all the equipment and supplies he needs to maintain as much comfort and independence as one can have possibly hold onto when living with such a horrific disease. There are far too many ALS patients who don’t have the means to get everything they need as they need it and so my hope is that I can sell enough cookies to make even one small piece of equipment available to another ALS patient so that  their Mt. Everest might be a little less steep even for a short while.

So that’s why I’m back in the kitchen already and why I hope enough orders come in that I end up remaining in the kitchen for a very long time. To get Sweet Hope Cookies up and running I made up a number of same Valentine’s Day cookie boxes that I’ll be showing to the folks at church this Sunday that will hopefully generate some orders. I have all the photos online here.

Posted in Cookies