500 Cookies and A Castle

This morning myself and 6 other women with a little help from our kitchen staff baked 500 cookies in less than 2 hours! The first few minutes were hectic as I the fearless leader and organizer with the recipes started weighing the flour on the scale for the first recipe while attempting to direct the others to grab bowls, chop, pour, measure and get them all going with tasks. It quickly settled into a routine and soon we were humming along with everybody busy making the cookies. We measured our ingredients, mixed our doughs and made our cookies in record time! I am in charge of our annual member guest invitational. I don't like saying I'm in charge but everybody on the committee keeps telling me that I am the chairperson of this event. I like the sound of co-chair so much more! I settled right into the pastry station which was a little walk down memory lane for me, it looks just like the one where I worked at Bizou, now Coco500 in San Francisco.


Here is the convection oven that made it all possible, this baby is incredible! 12 sheet pans with 30 cookies on each pan in 2 ovens for about 8 minutes with one rotation of the pan on the bottom rack.
We removed the sheet pans from the ovens, put them on racks to cool and went home for lunch. I came back a few hours later and bagged them up for the freezer to hold until next week at the golf tournament for a delicious treat to put in the golf carts.

I put a couple of plates of cookies out for the staff, sort of like a special treat for Santa at Christmas only without the milk.

The recipes for the cookies are from finecooking.com. We made chewy chocolate-chip cookies, peanut butter cookies and chewy cranberry-oatmeal cookies. We tripled each recipe and dropped the dough by rounded tablespoons which yielded 500 cookies. They were given a thumbs up by all the tasters! Now on to the castle, the Castello di Amorosa is in the Napa Valley about one hour away from my home. I just want to tell you up front that I had no idea that this castle was in Napa, actually it's right outside of Calistoga. I went there for the first time with a good friend of mine who joined their wine club and asked me if I wanted to tag along and see this really cool place while she picked up her wine. So, I said sure, I'll bring my camera and the rest is history, literally. Who needs to go to Europe when there is an authentic 12th century Tuscan castle-winery about an hour away where you can taste wines, take a tour, shop or have a food and wine pairing in the exclusive royal apartment. I'll get right on that last one!




The views inside the courtyard where they have a lot of their wine events are spectacular and are like being in a small village in Tuscany. The wine tasting, shopping and torture chamber are on the lower level. There is an actual torture chamber it's not just what the men call the shopping area!

The views from the castle are spectacular and if you visit the Napa Valley this is a fun place to tour, wine taste, shop and don't forget to check on the availability of that royal apartment!








There are 30 acres of vineyards surrounding the 121,000 square foot castle made of hand carved stones. Beautiful details are everywhere including a drawbridge and a moat!




I hope you enjoyed my castle pictures, I sure had fun taking them!