COOKIE WEEKEND

..... is FINALLY HERE!!! Its that time a year again, when the crazy Schreiter family gets together, and bakes an obscene amount of Christmas cookies, and butterstolen! Nobody really understands how intense cookie weekend is until they experience it and few lucky family friends and add ons have been with us over the years. It generally starts Friday night but everyone slowly arriving in town, bring extra baking supplies, cookie sheets, and cookie tins to fill and take home. All the cousins pow wow downstairs in the basement, and are awaken sometime Saturday morning to get the first batch of cookies in the oven by about 8am ... and the marathon day begins! We bake about 20 different varieties. Spritz, applesauce oaties, pinwheels, Santa's whiskers, chocolate chip cheesecake cupcakes, ap's, raspberry pinwheels ... just to name a few! After a day of baking cookies, we take some time to hang out with everyone, go on a trip to Macy's and the guys watch football. At about 11:00pm we start the butterstolen. It is a German Christmas bread recipe that was brought over my my great-grandparents, and the recipe is still written in German!! We mix the dough by hand, and get it ready to rise over night and start about 40 loaves of bread by 6 am on Sunday. I will post some pictures after the weekend is over so you can see how crazy we really are! But for now I'll leave you with some of the best memories: setting the attic on fire, the year we took over Nana's house and she wasn't even home, snow storms, eating too many cookies and cherries, the 1st year you were allowed to stay up late enough to see the bread made, the year they FINALLY let you mix the bread dough, matching t-shirts, getting told your not 'allowed' to make certain cookies because you mess them up, the infamous cookie stealer, pizza, and finding funny birthday cards from when our parents were little, and one get well card that my Nana couldn't even remember why that child was in the hospital! HAHA! Bring on the COOKIE EXPRESS!!! I fly out tomorrow night :)