I was wondering how many hours it takes to fill a large order for cookie. Basic one color cookie with minimum of decoration. I'm thinking of making cookies for our school fashion show fundraiser and before I commit to this I want to have an idea of the time commitment. I think it's over my head with 200 attendees.

Thanks,

Judi

Hmmm, I would think the baking and plain decorating of 200 cookies is likely to be a full days work! I know it can take me up to 30 minutes to complete 1 very detailed cookie! Antonia74 is the best person to ask - she's a pro when it comes to cookies!

Let's see...hopefully this could give you an idea. I work full time but during Christmas I made over 200 cookies in about 2-3 days. One night I had to make 60 cookies total. I probably started around 7:30 then finished at 1am. It really depends on your schedule.

I had a contract with a car dealership for 20 dozen cookies every single day for 4 of their locations, plus a smaller batch on Saturday, for a total of 100 dozen cookies every week......and I worked a full time job at the time. These were basically drop cookies ...... choc chip, PB, snickerdoodles .... with some cookies that took a bit more work and decorating.

It took me 4 hours every night after I got home from work. I had to cancel the contract when my wedding/catering biz started picking up. I have cookie sheets that allowed me to bake 20 cookies per sheet, so they were pretty good size (the biggest ones that would fit in my oven).

I always like to allow at least 48 hours for large orders. One day is for the drying if you are going to bag the cookies, I have large ovens, so I can bake a ton of cookies at one time though. If you are using a home oven, I would allow 3 days, unless you can handle extremely long days. You also have to consider space for drying. Remember, you can bake and freeze the cookies ahead so that might help.

I have a double convection oven so I can bake 3 trays at a time and can make 6 trays if I use both top and lower oven. It would take me around 2 hours to make the dough, cut and bake.

The decorating takes longer. Usually a full day or longer if I do layering of icing because I let the layers dry first.

It would depend on your oven capacity and the humidity in your area. give it about 2-3 days as some CCer's have said.

Good Luck!

Hi, I have done 200-250 in 3 days. I usually do all of the baking in one shot (1 day), decorating (1 day), and bag them the next day after they have a chance to cure. I did them in assembly line fashion. I home bake now and these were for my department at work. I had cookies staged in a spare room to cure. It was funny looking with them all stacked criss crossed in their trays but it worked out quite nicely. Larger orders I would allow myself another day incase the decorating part goes overtime.

Hope this helps and everyone else has great responses too, seems like we all have the same thoughts. Good luck and have fun.

three to four nights. I too work full time, and when doing large orders of cookies. I make my dough one night, roll and cut, next night is rolling fondant and cutting shapes wrap well in plastic wrap, 3rd night is baking as the cookies come out of the oven the fondant is placed on top, allow to come to room temp and let the fondant set up some, finish up decorating and bag and tag.

When making such a large volume is there a good standard recipe? How many does one batch yield?

I made 300 cookies for my wedding . . . and I did it over the course of about 5 nights. I think I baked about 200 one night, and about 100 the next night (the 100 were being cut out by hand instead of a cookie cutter, so it took longer). I then covered in rolled butter cream all 200 of the cookie cutter cookies one night, the next night I did the royal icing accents and covered the other 100 cookies in rolled buttercream, and the final day I did the royal icing accents on the remaining 100 cookies. I think I worked about 4-6 hours each of the nights I worked . . . so it was probably about 30 hours total. I think these cookies were extremely detailed, and some of them had to be cut by hand rather than with a cookie cutter, so it could be much faster if you have less complicated cookies. Hope that helps.

DannysmommyVal,

Yes that gives me a good idea of how many I could expect to make.
It seems like the NFSC is the way to go.

Thanks so much,
Karen