Welcome to the blog for Colgate University's interdisciplinary course on food. This is the place to keep up with what students in the course are experiencing in their work at Common Thread Community Farm and through their everyday encounters with food.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Making Waffle Cookies

Last summer I started a business called The Waffle Cookie. It is a social enterprise, so for every ten waffle cookies sold, we donate a meal to a person in need in Detroit through our non-profit partner, Forgotten Harvest. For the past two summers, we have been selling in local retail stores and at farmer's markets. We also sell year-round online on our website. When I am at Colgate, I bake all the orders that come in from the website and another baker in Michigan bakes any local orders.

This past weekend I spent about eight hours baking and packaging orders for the week. We had 21 orders to fulfill and each order contains eight waffle cookies. The first step is preparation of the packaging materials. We write the different flavors on the labels and then put the labels onto the clear bags. Next, we construct the cardboard boxes that the waffle cookies will be put in. After the packaging is prepared, I make the waffle cookie dough and heat up the irons. I make sure to spray the irons with canola oil before starting so that the cookies do not stick to the iron. The actual spreading of the dough into the waffle iron takes the most effort. Once all four quadrants are covered, I close the  iron and wait for two minutes. When I open the iron, I make sure to take the waffle cookies out in the same order that they were put in so that the cooking time evens out between all four. Usually, the ones that were put in last will need some extra cooking time after they have been flipped.

Once the waffle cookies have cooled, we put them into the clear bags and use a heat-sealer machine to close the bags. After all the waffle cookies have been packaged, we put them into the brown boxes and seal the boxes after including a flyer and a sticker.

For this particular weekend, all but one of the orders were on-campus deliveries so we sorted the order forms by building. Lastly, we drove to the different dorms and dropped off all the packages to each student. This weekend, we will repeat the same process again!



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