Planning for holiday baking and candy making

A really neat tool for planning your holiday baking can be found at OrganizedChristmas.com. It's a special form you can print out to keep track of what you plan to bake -- I use it to keep track of fruitcakes,cookies, breads and candies I make for Christmas giving.

There's a column for listing the name of the item, and one for noting down where the recipe is located -- in a specific cookbook, say, or in your recipe file. A third column is for listing down any special ingredients that you might not ordinarily have on hand. For example...

ITEM | RECIPE LOCATION | EXTRA INGREDIENTS

Pepparkakor| recipe notebook | 1 orange

Whipped | recipe notebook | real butter; cornstarch
Shortbread

Chocolate | Cook & Tell Dec. '91 | 2 7-ounce Hershey bars,
Fruitcake maraschino cherries, dates

And so on. There's also a column to check off when you've made the item, and others for when you've wrapped and sent the goodies. Another printable sheet titled Holiday Freezer Inventory helps you stay on top of what goodies you've stashed in your freezer.

I also keep a master list of items I generally cook and bake at Christmas time, and a long-term shopping list of ingredients needed for all of those items. That way I can start buying a few ingredients ahead each week starting as early as October. Since I start baking for the freezer in November, the ingredients are already on hand and the expense is spread out rather than being a huge outlay of funds in early or mid-December.

Hope these ideas are helpful to someone else! They sure have been a help to me.