Logistics and Joy of Baking Holiday Cookies and Delivering Them the Academic Way

All academics have to be very patient - it takes time to get a PhD, time to get promotion and tenure, and one has to wait referees' reports on journal articles that we submit, which we then revise, and, hopefully, the articles that we have labored so hard on, do get accepted and then published, which also takes time!

It is, hence, advisable to also have activities that one can engage in that one gets more or less instant gratification from and focuses a different part of the brain, although, as an academic, one brings one's analytical and critical thinking skills to almost any endeavor.

This time of the year, when the weather gets colder, and the days shorter, and one has recovered from the Thanksgiving travel and celebrations, I always enjoy baking holiday cookies. But even more so, I enjoy delivering them to friends and neighbors.

The logistics of cookie baking involves identifying the types of cookies to be baked and finding the recipes, procuring the necessary ingredients, scheduling the baking of the cookie varieties (some, serendipitously, might not even require baking, such as our famous chocolate rum walnut balls), waiting for them to cool, decorating them, if necessary, putting them on plates for delivery and packaging them nicely. Then I usually insert a nice holiday card and figure out the optimal routing for delivery, always taking into consideration the day and time of departure to try and find the recipients at home.

This year, the first batches of cookies that I baked took parts of two different days and a big tip is using parchment paper since there is no cleaning of baking pans before putting on the next batch and into the oven.

Below are some photos from this baking project and my family members are the taste testers and approvers.

The ingredients in the cookie recipes this year included lots of almond paste, candied cherries, coconut, pecans, walnuts, chocolate,  the usual butter, sugar, and vanilla, plus raspberry jam, to make butter cookies that our wonderful staff member at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Wivvian Hall, once made for me when I was a Visiting Professor there and then gave me the recipe!

Now, since our friends and neighbors range from very young children to those in the mid80s, and many children like the less fancy cookies, I also make some cookies (see above) with reindeer faces and Christmas trees on them. These are ready to bake.

This past Sunday, we did one of the biggest deliveries, and to see the joy on the neighbors' faces was very special. Even two little boys wrote us a beautiful thank you card and delivered it to our door. It is important, especially in this day and age, to support your immediate community and neighbors and to show that they matter. Baking is a labor of love and a way of saying, in a small way, that someone matters. We will continue to be making deliveries and baking as well, which provide a warm and welcoming break from end of the semester projects, exams, and all sorts of committee meetings.

Of course, I also plan to bake more cookies for various events and parties including our end of the semester UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party at the Isenberg School of Management. This semester I am teaching a class on Transportation and Logistics and am practicing what I preach.

Happy holidays!

Baking Holiday Cookies with Photos

December is a time of the year when, in academia, projects and papers for courses are due, exams are being prepared, then taken (by students), and graded (by professors).

While working on finishing up the semester and writing up a final exam I every year look forward to baking and distributing cookies with my daughter.

Yes, I am a professor who likes to bake (and also loves to give out and eat cookies).

Somehow (I think we in Operations Research just tend to be very efficient at our tasks), I managed to finish a paper this past week that I will be presenting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, this Monday, and did my first batch of holiday baking.

I also very much enjoy the logistics of baking (from the shopping for the ingredients to the preparation to the artistry and science of assemblying the cookies, decorating them and baking them).

Above are some photos taken of the results. All the cookies (except for one plate) have already been distributed to some friends and neighbors (hope to bake more after the semester and grading are over with).

In the meantime, enjoy this holiday season!

Because of a Postcard from Yalta I Won a Plate of Holiday Cookies!

Last night, at around 8:30PM, I received a phone call from Phyllis Lehrer, a columnist for the Amherst Bulletin, who writes the column: Network Amherst: The Lehrer Report.

She congratulated me and told me that my postcard from Yalta made me a winner of her winter postcard contest and that she wanted to know what time (today) she could bring over a plate of cookies that she had made. Phyllis runs a contest twice a year and selects the winners of the postcards sent to her that came from the greatest distance.

In the summer, the prize consists of tomatoes that she has grown. In the winter, the prize is a plate of holiday cookies. She gives out two prizes each time.

The competition this year was tough she told me, since she had identified the Pistrang family as one of the winners (and she had not been able to reach them), but then she had to do some research and serious measuring to determine whether my postcard or a postcard from our wonderful state representative, Stan Rosenberg, who had sent a postcard from Russia, had traveled the greater distance to Amherst. She felt confident that I was the winner. Stan had won this competition before when he sent a postcard from Bhutan, so I hope that he is not too disappointed !

I had been to Yalta last August to give a keynote talk at the Network Science conference there. The trip was an amazing adventure and the conference a big success as well. I can't share the postcard with you, since Phyllis has it, but you can read about my experiences and see photos here.

Above is the plate with wrapping and card that Phyllis brought over this morning. The collection of cookies consisted of: chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, molasses, chocolate with peanut butter chips and peanut butter with chocolate kisses.

As someone who has written several times about baking cookies (and the logistics, thereof, since I practice what I teach at the Isenberg School), Phyllis' generosity and kindness capture in a unique way not only this special time of year but why the town of Amherst is like no other!

Thank you, Phyllis Lehrer. The cookies are delicious!

And as for what Stan Rosenberg was doing in Bhutan, this UMass Amherst grad was hiking the Himalayas!

********* Updated on December 24, 2010*******************************

The official announcement from Phyllis Lehrer in The Amherst Bulletin is here.

A Professor who Loves to Bake and Give Out Cookies

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I engage in one of my favorite activities this time of year -- the baking and distribution of holiday cookies, with help from my daughter.

This year, thus far, we made a variety of delicious cookies from chocolate-dipped macaroons, to rum walnut balls, to butter sugar cookies in the shapes of holiday mittens, to cherry-decorated almond morsels, to start. The planning and completion of this major production involved numerous activities, from the shopping, to the preparation, to the grating, and the mixing, the baking, and the decorating.

I very much enjoy putting into practice what I teach for a living and just before Thanksgiving I covered the critical path method and project planning in one of my classes, which was perfectly timed.

The most fun of all is the assemblying of the plates with the cookies, which are festooned with colorful ribbons, along with a holiday card, and the delivery to our neighbors and friends.

In the photo above are some of the cookies that we baked over several shifts!

For photos of some of the delights from last year, click here.

Holiday Cookies and Operations Research

It's the season of baking and what could be more fun before the end of the semester projects, presentations, and finals than to explore one's creativity in other ways. Once Thanksgiving is over and the turkey is fully digested, my daughter and I begin our holiday tradition of baking cookies for neighbors. This is quite the logistical operation, since we like to always include our tried and true recipes as well as to explore new ones. This year's cookie plates include: coconut chocolate-dipped macaroons, pecan shortbread logs, almond cookies with cherries, shortbread cookies, walnut rumballs, and what we call stained glass cookies (in star formation above), which are my daughter's specialty.

The baking is great fun, as well as the wrapping, but the most fun is when my daughter delivers them door to door (always determining the most efficient route first and identifying when the neighbors are likely to be home). Since she listened (without choice) to my graduate lectures on operations research and management science while in utero she is a natural when it comes to organization and efficiency. Plus, as a child of faculty members, she does tend to absorb the material that we can't help but discuss.

Plates of holiday cookies are a small way in which we acknowledge our terrific neighbors.

As for the family larder, we will have to bake again to replenish the cookie supplies.