RED DEVILS FOOD MURDER

Hannah is asked by Grandma Knudsen to investigate a minister who is substituting while the regular pastor is on his honeymoon. The young man lived with Grandma during high school but she is a little suspicious that he isn't who he says that he is. With Andrea's help, they check the man out, only to have him turn up dead a few days later. Once again, Hannah's love life is nearly as complicated as the murder that she sets out to solve.

I love visiting Hannah, her family and friends. I don't expect a deep, dark mystery and I am satisfied with a cozy read. As usual, I enjoyed the light story and the recipes. I did think there was an obvious mistake in police procedures wtih identification of the body. I am not the best at picking these things up, so if I noticed, I feel that most people would. Sure enough, I was able to figure out the murderer. Once again, Hannah's love triangle was a part of the story, but like the last installment, things seemed to be moving forward a little bit. As usual, I'll be anxious to read the next in this series.

Rating - B+

The Big 1000

We are so happy to announce that we have reached $1000 before our spring baking break. Very excited that the cookies are going over so well! Thank you to all who have supported us. We would like to sell at least another thousand in cookies before we start working on our pink parties for this summer! Stay tuned and thanks again!

Update

Just a quick little update!
We have made over $600 which means we are a little over a fourth of the way to our goal of $2300! I still have not made it very public at school since we have had such a great response from neighbors and friends. Keep an eye out for posters at school in the coming weeks!

The Big Cookie Bang

Hello everyone!

Needless to say I was thrilled when I discovered that I did not have school for another day today! (Especially since I don't have to make snow days up as a senior!) Mom, the crazy woman thought that she would get home from work at about 10 in the morning and she would just bake as many cookies as she could. This concerned me since we had over 600 cookies to bake! But since I didn't have school, we tag teamed to crank out all of the cookies, package them, and make labels. We started just short of 10 this morning and worked until about 5 in the afternoon. We must admit that we semi-stopped for a lunch break while some cookies were in the oven. That makes glorious hours of baking fun! All sarcasm aside though, I think that we were both very glad for the other person. We had a pretty good system: One person would remove cookies from a pan and fill them then put them in and we would rotate. So, you would work for about 15 minutes and then go do whatever you wanted for the next 15. We had lots of lists, sticky notes, and used our calculator a lot to try to keep organized. At the beginning of the week we were a little worried about how we were going to transport this massive amount of baked goods to Iowa State on Saturday. One household can only have so much tupperware. (Even a house like ours.) After much consideration, we decided that we could not and would not put up with 50 styrafoam boxes rubbing together for some 3 hours. So we used all 4 of our large tupperware boxes and then packed the rest in gallon Ziploc bags and placed them in my under the bed Rubbermaid storage box. We are very glad that we are done and have decided that we will never accept this many cookie orders in one week again!

Fascinating Stats

612 Cookies

41 pans of cookies

7 hours

9.5 lbs of butter used

10- the minimum number of times we stopped to recalculate

Before....

Hey everyone! We started out this week thinking that we would be doing a couple dozen cookies for the CEW retreat at Lourdes and a few more dozen that we would bring to our beloved Ames residents this weekend when we go up for Emily's Mom's Weekend at AGD. Soon, however, we looked at our spread sheet, only to find that we already had about $70 worth of orders even before we got word from Benjamin and Em. Uh oh! What had we done? B said that he would make a list and spread the word about our cookies during his chapter meeting on Monday. I was working at good ol' Whitey's when I received the message of our doom. "16 M&M, 14 Chocolate Chip, 3 Toffee Bars, 9 Double Peanut Butter, 8 Snickerdoodle." I almost fainted when I saw this. God Bless the ATO Boys, though! We love them as our own and we are so appreciative that they were so willing to help us out. We added up the number of dozens(50) and the number of cookies (600!!!!) for the boys alone. Any bets on the number of hours it will take or how many sticks of butter we will use can placed in the comments below. We will be sure to share the results with you. Inserted is our "Before" picture. We will soon be starting the dough-making process and there will be no turning back! Stay tuned for our wild week as Cookies for the Cure hits the road!

Shout Outs!

We would like to give out some very special thank you's to Sue Dilley, Carol Six, and Zach Miller for all of their help getting the word out about Cookies for the Cure! We couldn't have come this far without you guys. We are almost done with the second week and we are looking forward to a great third! This week we asked Ben and Emily to ask their friends if they wanted to buy any that we could bring up to Ames next weekend for Mom's Day at Alpha Gamma Delta. Keeping our fingers crossed that these nice college students can find a couple of dollars to buy some cookies!
We will keep you in the know!
Mary Kate

Baking Day!

Hey! Mary Kate here!
Yesterday I spent all day at my church's youth retreat! My friend Zach and I gave a talk to a group of teens about our mothers going through breast cancer. People were very supportive of us and I would say that it went very well! We passed out the cookies with pink M&Ms and they were well received! While I was at church, mom baked the chocolate chip, M&M, and double peanut butter cookies. Sound like a lot? I know! I told her the night before that I would do the double peanut butter with her on Sunday but I came home to find that she had not listened! So today all that we had left were the snickerdoodles and one lonely chocolate chip dozen. It was pretty smooth sailing (much easier when you have two sets of hands to roll and coat with cinnamon sugar!) Then I went about setting up the dining room table for the pick-up station. We figured that we should deck it out in our favorite color, PINK! I put a picture below. Since the Miller family had a bunch of orders that they so kindly offered to deliver, we brought them over to their house in of course, Longaberger baskets, during half time of the Packers-Bears game. Since we had quite a few extra cookies of each kind, I decided to give each of this week's customers a number and randomly select one person to receive a "Lucky Dozen" filled with a variety of cookies! Congrats to this week's winner: Natalie Martin! Stay tuned for more updates!
-Mary Kate