The Cooking and Baking Ritual by Rev. Carol A. Ingle (Raven)

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

The Cooking and Baking Ritual

While it is traditional among many to bake cookies for the Yuletide season, cookies can be baked at any time. These cookies were extra special, because we made them in ritual, and infused them with a spell for prosperity, health and happiness.

Before the ritual

Decide on what kind of cookies you are going to make. This ritual will work with any homemade cookie recipe. We baked butter cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and 3 different varieties of oatmeal cookies (plain, raisin and walnut). Test your recipe before you do bulk baking. That may take several days.

We found most of our recipes online at:

www.allrecipies.com (a very good website)

However, the absolutely divine oatmeal cookie recipe was found on the Quaker Oats box.

How many cookies are you going to make? We made 3 dozen cookies for each person on our gift list. That came to something like 96 dozen cookies. (yes, we are nuts, we know.)

Once you have know the quantity you are going to make, you can make up your shopping list. Then it's off to the store.

Just make sure you have all the ingredients before you get started. You will be in circle during the entire baking process, so you won't be able to go run to the store for a box of baking soda or sugar.

Clean and purify the kitchen the same way you would prepare any other sacred space. You may want to bathe, shower, or otherwise cleanse yourself and everyone else. Please remember to at least wash your hands; you will be cooking food, after all.

Gather all the ingredients, bowls, pans, utensils, whatever you will need for baking, and arrange on the counter. If you are going to use your normal ritual tools, bring them into the kitchen as well. We don't recommend lighting incense during this ritual because it interferes with the delicious baking odors.

Gather the cooks and helpers who will be baking and casting the spell together. You are now ready to start.

Turn off the ringers on the phones in your house, so you're not disturbed during the ritual.

The ritual create sacred space in your usual manner. It's a good idea, if you are casting a circle, to include the entire house. Otherwise, you'll be cutting gates all day as people need to take bathroom breaks or whatnot. It took us over 10 hours to bake all our cookies. Ground and center yourselves.

Now it's time to start baking. We found the best results were by dividing up the labor. My husband is the 'master chef' because of his years spent working in a bakery. He was in charge of the overall supervision, timing (knowing when to take the cookies out of the oven before they start to burn) and most of the transferring of the dough to the cookie sheets. I was in charge of measuring, and cleaning bowls, utensils and pans. We had quite the production line going that day. Our daughter was the helper and dough taster she helped me with measuring ingredients.

Start measuring and mixing ingredients together, according to your recipe.

Pre-heat your oven. When you are at the point in the recipe where you are doing the final mixing of the dough, have everyone hold onto the spoon (no electric beaters for this part), and start chanting. You want to raise energy and put it into the cookie dough. We used the largest wooden spoon with the longest handle in the kitchen. Everyone held the spoon together, and we stirred the dough clockwise while we chanted.

Here is the chant that we used:

"Health and wealth and happiness be
To all who eat these cookies by me!"

Feel free to write your own chant.

Once the dough has been charged with the spell, place on cookie sheets and bake.

When all the cookies have been baked, and cooled, sample one, for each of you. Reserve several cookies as offerings to the Gods. (they like yummy treats, too)

Open the circle in your usual fashion.

~End of ritual~

After the Ritual

After we had taken down the circle, we packaged the cookies in their gift bags. We decided to tell everyone that the cookies were blessed. We even told our non-Pagan relatives. Just as you wouldn't cast a spell for or on someone without permission, we didn't want to "trick" someone into eating them, either.