Insanity, baked.

I'll cut right to the chase: Wheaton has bizarre things called raids whereby your hall stays up very late and puts on a themed event for the other halls on your floor. There are loud raids and silent raids. Loud raids involve waking up the people on the other halls and forcing them to watch you sing and dance and play silly games. Silent raids involve being very quiet, decorating the other halls and leaving cute little (often edible) presents for them to wake up to at reasonable hours.

And this is all relevant BECAUSE my hall did a little silent raid last night. And as you would expect, I was in charge of the cute little edible presents. And as you would expect, I went a little overboard. Because when you have to make 200 cookies, why wouldn't you do something as elaborate as possible? I mean, it's Valentine's. It's all about being elaborate.

Yes, I know, the quality's awful. But when you just made 200
cookies, you don't exactly feel like finding a real camera.

If you couldn't tell, these were a lot of work. But they were also fun. I got to be super-sneaky -- aside from separating eggs, softening butter, and actually baking these guys, all of this happened in our floor lounge, which is definitely not a kitchen. And I got to do all sorts of fun fractions to figure out how many parts to cut each log into during the slicing phase. And making royal icing means getting rid of excess royal icing, which translates roughly to roaming our hall asking if anyone wanted "frosting à la carte" (which they did).

And even better, I was able to make cookies to my heart's content and know that they would all be eaten, no pushing or shoving required. It was delightful, except for the waking-up-this-morning-after-only-five-hours-of-sleep thing. Small potatoes.