Buffalo bakers make 150 dozen cookies this holiday season | Local Entertainment

“I don’t give a damn if I make a mess,” she said. “Usually by the end of the day, I’m super, super messy.”

Piping chocolate is the finishing touch to peanut butter cookies filled with a peanut butter cream cheese filling. It’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and she’s baked nearly six hours into the day. It had to start early in order to finish baking about 78 dozen cookies (or 936 cookies), which also included a crucial noon break to watch the Minnesota Vikings game.

While she does some baking for other occasions, like Valentine’s Day and birthdays, Strouf said Christmas is her busiest time of year.

In December, she has placed orders for about 148 dozen cookies. There are varieties such as Cream Cheese Frosted Cookies, Lemon Raspberry Sugar Cookies, Peanut Butter Balls, Oreo Balls and Russian Tea Cakes, all made with the Strouf family recipe. If you want to decorate the cookies yourself, Strouf offers a sugar cookie box with red and green icing piping bags. While the sheer number of cookies Strouf makes is enough to put most bakers off guard, it’s even more impressive that she’s doing it outside of her day job as a special education teacher in Campbell County. She says she only has so much time for baking because all her kids are now in college, and since baking is such a family tradition, she’ll do anything to make time. “I do it because I love it,” she said. “I love cooking and baking, my mom loved it, my grandma loved it, my great-grandmother loved it. We love that other people love it, and we love making other people happy.” Strouf says the love of baking is driven by Inspired by her great-grandmother, who taught Strouf to bake chocolate chip cookies when she was a child on the family farm. Back then, all the mixing was done by hand.

“She’s just using a big spoon type of thing to mix the dough, and now, you know, we have KitchenAid mixers and things like that, so things have come a long way,” Strouf said. “However, I love the memories with my great-grandmother. She taught me how to make chocolate chip cookies and I’m always impressed that I still make them to this day.”

After learning from her great-grandmother, Strouf says she continued to bake with her grandmother and, eventually, her mother—though she says she’s the only one of her siblings who went on to build a love of baking.

While that love hasn’t changed over the years, Strouf says baking for so many holiday customers has turned the process into a mathematical equation that’s more important than she ever imagined.

That means pre-cutting a mound of butter and cream cheese, letting it come to room temperature on the kitchen counter, and stacking the appropriate number of boxes on her dining table, ready to be stuffed with cookies for customers.

With so many orders to fulfill, she said, people often assumed she would go to a bulk store in Casper or Billings to buy ingredients. But she’s actually just shopping at a Walmart in Sheridan.

It’s easier because it’s closer, she said, and because she doesn’t have to lug about 50 pounds of sugar and flour sacks.

But no matter where she shopped, prices had gotten very expensive over the past year, she said.

“I have a list of all my ingredients,” she says. “A lot of times, even the ingredients are hard to find, so if I see they’re in stock, I buy them because otherwise when I actually need them to place an order, I might not be able to find them.”

Despite rising ingredient prices over the past year, Strouf said she’s keeping finished product prices low because, for her, baking isn’t about making money, but about spreading a little holiday cheer through baked goods.

“I really enjoy doing it because it brings joy to other people,” she said. “I love doing it, it’s how I was raised and I’m super excited to break with tradition and carry it on in my family.”