Cookies and more cookies

So - My friend Amy from Montana decided to get married in Long Beach, CA! Yay for me - no travel. And right away - we talked about me making cookie favors. I couldn't wait to get started. So after lots of planning and discussion with Doreen at Bella Loves Caking (check out the cake she made for the wedding)....we came up with a design. The fact that Amy's new last name was going to be Starr made it pretty easy.

So I started by laying out 35 sticks of butter to soften...for 7 double batches of cookie dough


Then I used my 25 lb bag of powdered sugar that I picked up at Costco for $12 to make 6 double batches of royal icing...


My Mixer got a WORKOUT - this all would have been impossible without the kitchenaid mixer!

Then I talked my friend Sue into letting me use her kitchen for the baking. When your choices are one smallish electric oven, or two normal size convection ovens, plus a HUGE granite island...the choice is obvious. The fact that her house is right on the water was an added bonus, ocean breezes keep a house very cool while baking!

I schlepped all my trays, and icing, and dough over to Sue's house and spent about 3 hours baking 150 stars and 150 little squares...not too bad considering. Plus her ovens are so awesome, I almost couldn't keep up.

Then...with some help from Sue and Amy who apparently didn't have anything better to do (Sue was avoiding writing performance evaluations, and Amy was avoiding the smoke smell at her house from a car explosion in their parking garage - nice)...we outlined and filled all the cookies.

Doreen - ever the craigslist surfer found these full size sheet pans on sale for $3 a piece...so I bought ten. Turns out I only needed 9 - but boy did they come in handy for keeping all this stuff out of the way overnight - figuring Sue and Dale didn't want cookies spread all over their designer kitchen!

As I iced the squares, I was also applying the edible image monogram that Doreen's friend made for us, and Doreen printed on her new handy edible image printer thingamajig.


After about 11 hours of cutting, rolling, baking and icing - i stacked up all the trays and let them dry overnight. Sue was nice enough to make me salmon dinner with asparagus and corn on the cob and rosemary bread from Costco! Yay for great friends!

The next morning I came back and stacked the squares on the stars and then brushed everything with a little coating of pearl luster dust - a subtlety that probably wasn't really noticed by anyone, but which made the cookies just a little sparkly instead of dull.

I then re-stacked all the trays (with about a millimeter clearance now that they were stacked) and loaded them into my Honda civic. A totally practical car for transporting full size sheet pans.

Once I got them home, I added one last detail and piped a border around the monogram for a more finished look.

This was about the only place available to take a decent picture - on a kitchen towel, carefully set on the kitchen windowsill.

I think they ended up a huge success, the bride and groom love them, and a lot of people were eating them while waiting for dinner...lots of compliments. The day after the wedding at brunch, one of the groomsmen informed me that he'd gone around to the tables after people had mostly left, and collected the rest of the cookies. Apparently he had about 10 in his room, and he planned to eat them all!