Our First Official Order!

My friend and I decided that this year for Christmas we were going to try something new. We sat down and brainstormed and came up with an idea to give us stay-at-home moms a little purpose outside of our four walls as well as hopefully bring in a little bit of extra cash to help out with our family finances if we could. We poured over our cookie recipes, looked at old Christmas magazines and searched the internet to look for recipes that sounded like delicious Christmas cookies to us. We, along with our husbands, did some number crunching, went over marketing strategies and worked on flyer layouts and eventually came up with The Cookie Kitchen. We've been baking and testing (of course!) and modifying and asking opinions and we now have six delicious cookies that are featured in our Christmas platters. Listen to these descriptions and tell me that they don't sound mouthwatering to you!

* Cinnamon Stars *

Chewy almond and cinnamon stars with a hint of liqueur, elegantly topped with a light and crispy meringue

* Chocolate Caramel Delights *

Soft, decadent chocolate cookies rolled in crushed pecans with a soft caramel center

* Soft Gingersnaps *

Soft and chewy witha a delightful taste of Christmas spices, including Watkins Purest Ground Cinnamon and Watkins Double Strength Vanilla

* Peppermint Pinwheels *

Thin and chewy peppermint delights, pleasing both to the eye and palette

* Christmas Spritz *

Delicate chocolate spritz dipped on one side in white chocolate and sprinkled with crushed peppermint candy

* Grandma's Shortbread *

Rich and buttery shortbread cut-outs decorated with handcrafted detail

Don't those sound GREAT?! They are. Trust me. Trust our families. We've tried them all to make sure that they would be hits on a Christmas cookie platter.

So this past week, my friend and I put on our walking shoes and hit the neighborhood with our flyers. We figured that there have to be some people out there that want to serve Christmas cookies this year, but just don't have the time or talent to make them. That's where we wanted to step in and help. We got our first order before plans were even finalized by a friend who teaches piano and has a recital at the beginning of December. She said that she could either buy a couple hundred cookies from the grocery store, or she could buy them from us! She decided to buy "real" ones from us!

But our first OFFICIAL order came in tonight! We included my email address and phone number on our flyers that were distributed around our neighborhood and tonight we got our first real order from the flyers for three platters of cookies! And to top it off, this person said that she hopes we don't mind, but she took the flyer to work because no one there has time to bake either! We're so excited! We have about twelve platters ordered as of right now, with promises of more to come in the next few weeks.

You are wondering how two moms with little kids can pull something like this off, right? We were wondering, too, but we've really committed this in prayer and we believe that God will help us to accomplish this. We both feel the need to have a goal beyond the day to day activities of taking care of our families, to have a sense of accomplishment, and to assure ourselves that we really still do have brains and can manage a little business. Keeping this project in constant prayer has allowed us to do a ton of homework on pricing out our cookies, figuring out our costs, deciding the most appropriate wording for the flyer, organizing a distribution plan and even start ahead on some of the orders that are needed in two weeks! We have not been stressed out by this. We are not feeling overwhelmed. We ARE feeling a bond growing between us as we work on our cookies together. We ARE thanking the Lord for the idea, the initiative, our husbands' backing, our ability to work so well together, our children who love when we break the cookies or make a batch a little too dark, for the perfect walking weather the only day we had available to walk around the neighborhood, etc. I honestly believe that this project was an inspiration from the Lord because He knows the needs of the two of us and has been blessing us so far. Don't worry. Our families have not been neglected in any way (except when we tell them they can't have the batch of cookies that just came out of the oven!), and have actually been our biggest cheerleaders from the beginning.

Who knows where this will all take us, but for now, we're thrilled that we have an official order from someone we don't even know and we're enjoying the excitement of working together on these cookies to help out others and ourselves! Anyone need a platter for their Christmas get togethers?? Just let us know!