It’s cookie time!

Jennifer Laurin isn’t making her usual batches of 32 different kinds of Christmas cookies this year.

She is down to one batch each of a mere 23 unique types.

Yes, the Covid-19 pandemic has reached the oven of the prolific baker’s small kitchen in her century-old Port Washington home and has slightly dented the distribution of Christmas delectability.

With fewer places to take her cookies, what with not wanting to risk the spread of germs, Laurin decided not to make as many.

But that doesn’t mean her nearby family and friends, including her husband and three children, are going without.

“Everybody has their favorite. It was hard to scale back,” Laurin said.

Most of the family, she said, loves the sugar cookies with her homemade butter cream frosting.

One of Laurin’s favorites is made from a recipe handed down from her great-grandmother Amy, whom she only met as a baby. She makes Amy’s Danish cream cookies every year.

“I just remember eating them when I was a little child at Christmas events,” she said. “There’s something about music and what you eat that brings you back.”

It’s Laurin’s baking that brings her back to Costco each winter. She is the one with three 20-pound bags of flour in her cart, along with five dozen eggs and 20 pounds each of butter and sugar.

“I just developed a passion for it,” she said. “I stress-bake. I think it’s just relaxation. I can focus on what I’m doing.”

Laurin helped her mother and grandmother in the kitchen when she was young, but the hobby hasn’t yet carried over to her children, Tyler, 16, Katie, 15 and Ben, 11. The kids will “once in a while pull a tray out of the oven and help decorate,” Laurin said.

She starts the first week of December and spends 10 to 12 hours in the kitchen on multiple days to crank out the cookies. Christmas music or movies play in the background.

“We’re a little Christmas obsessed around here,” Laurin said.

She has made 70 different kinds of cookies. Now, when one enters the rotation, another has to exit her handwritten list.

Recipes hail from a host of resources, including Laurin’s mother, Shelby Stark, who lives in Port, the internet and the We Energies Christmas-cookie books. She collects them and has books from the 1950s.

Some inspiration comes from shopping. She kept seeing peppermint chips in the store and finally found a use for them—double chocolate peppermint pudding crunch.

Laurin makes sure her ingredients are authentic. She uses real vanilla extract and real butter, which replaces oleo in her great-grandmother’s recipe.

Laurin said she is “paranoid” about cleanliness and the kitchen is “off limits” to family during baking.

She is as efficient as she is clean. Laurin gets all of her ingredients out and measures everything before she starts baking. She often has three batches going at one time. One will be in the oven, another in the mixer and she will either be pulling ingredients for the third or one will be in the decoration stage.

Pads help soften the kitchen’s hardwood floor and thus ease some of the aches. “At the end of the day, I’m pretty tired,” Laurin said.

Decorations get replaced as needed. “We have a whole drawer full of sprinkles,” Laurin said.

Baking is scientific and takes planning, she said. Butter has to be left out until it’s soft but not too soft.

She does not use pastry piping bags, saying she wants to make treats to eat rather than look at.

Laurin used to take a few days off from her administrative assistant job for a Saukville accountant, but this year she worked around the schedule of her new part-time job as office manager of Chocolate Chisel in downtown Port.

Despite being ultra-organized, Laurin has had her share of mishaps. Once, parchment paper slid off the pan and the cookies ended up at the bottom of the oven. Another time, Laurin used half as much flour as the recipe required with disastrous results.

One of her biggest adjustments over the years was when she got a new gas oven. There was a learning curve with figuring out how it heats and finding its hotspots.

Cookies usually get mailed to family in the Upper Peninsula, New Mexico and Arizona and are given to neighbors, Laurin’s hair stylist, her children’s former elementary school teachers — they still remember her platters — and the Ozaukee Sheriff’s Office dispatch center, where her husband works as a supervisor. Some of his co-workers request certain kinds of cookies.

Even customers of her son’s lawn-mowing business get cookies.

“Everybody knows that I’m the cookie lady,” Laurin said. “It’s so much fun to make people happy.”

Laurin got more into baking cookies when she had children. The family didn’t have a lot of money but she could bake.

“I’m a giver. I love giving gifts,” she said. “Usually, it’s baked gifts.”

Once a cookie batch is complete, Laurin has one rule for her family.

“It has always been the policy that they’re totally off limits until Christmas Eve,” she said.

The delectables wait to head to their destinations in Rubbermaid containers in the garage. Not every cookie makes it.

Last year, after it snowed, Tyler took longer than usual to shovel. His mother learned he was sneaking cookies in the garage.

Laurin has more willpower.

“I don’t touch them until Christmas Eve,” she said.

That’s when the extended family comes over for heavy appetizers, cookies and holiday cheer. Nobody leaves without carrying a box of cookies to their cars. But the pandemic has halted the gathering for this year.

Cookies aren’t the only scrumptious items that emerge from Laurin’s kitchen. She makes scones, biscuits and zucchini, banana and pumpkin breads. For birthdays, she makes cakes.

Laurin also cooks. Her family loves her homemade broccoli cheese soup, lasagna and enchiladas.

She can go through a pound of pasta per meal, given three hungry children involved in sports.

“They complain when I buy prepared food,” Laurin said. “‘Mom, yours is better.’”

She avoids baking a dessert for at least one occasion per year, when the family buys a cake.

“I don’t bake for my birthday,” she said.