Wedding! and Wedding Placecard Cookies!

Hey Blog Friends! So I am back from our beautiful honeymoon in Mexico, and ready to share with you my Wedding cookie extravaganza blog post! I promise now that the wedding is over I will be baking and blogging at a more regular pace. For now, here are the details on the largest (by far) cookie project I've undertaken to date: 200 place card/cookies that would direct guests to their tables at Joe and I's August 20th wedding....

I started this project, as always, with a reflection on the real magic of baking: taking raw ingredients (pictured above) and turning them into something creative, beautiful, and of course delicious.

I used the white chocolate sugar cookie dough recipe that I outlined in my previous "wedding preview" blog post. I made 10 batches of the dough, which turned out to be way more than enough (I have some left in my freezer).

The dough took over the refrigerator, early in the week.

And I took it upon myself to roll and cut out all off the cookies. This was actually much less time consuming than one would think. It helped a lot to take my mind off all of the wedding stress actually, and turned out to be a huge blessing during a hectic week.

Then I baked them all, a batch at a time, for about 6 and half minutes each. It took around 3-4 hours. Haha. Burn victims were quickly gobbled up by my then-fiance-now-husband and/or myself.

I made a couple special cookies for him along the way too :)

Once I had about 230 finished cookies, I packed them up tight for safe keeping. The decorating and packing phases would take place in the following days, and for these time-consuming tasks, I called in all the troops....

My Sister/Maid-of Honor Jamie and Friend/Bridesmaid Kim volunteered to help with the decorating process..... They did a great job, although they had difficulty not eating all the cookies themselves.....

We frosted the cookies simply with a classic royal icing recipe I've used many times before. Although it's not the tastiest of frostings, it dries rock-hard and has a shiny-finished look.

We found ourselves getting constantly confused while counting/writing numbers on the cookies. It turns out it's very difficult to count to 10 when you're writing the number 5 over and over with frosting.

Next up was the wrapping phase. I did a small amount of the cookies myself, and realized I would need help for this part too....

So I wrapped up my dining room table as if it was a huge platter with saran wrap, and waited for reinforcements to arrive the next day.

Thank God for the Bridesmaid patrol: Jamie, Tasha, and Jenn.

With their help, we packaged all of the cookies, and packed them in reverse alphabetical order for delivery to the reception hall. (This involved an embarrassing amount of singing the alphabet outloud to make sure the order was correct). The day before the wedding we arranged them on the escort card table, for guests to see immediately as they walked into the wedding.

My mom even painted me this nifty sign, complete with a golden whisk.

I was very very proud and happy with how these cookies came out. They also worked relatively well as place cards, although I think we made too many table 15's, and Joe's Grandma crunched hers up before reading what table she was supposed to sit at. Woops.

All in all, it was a very successful project, and easily the happiest day of my life thus far. Hooray for Marriage, family, friends and of course.....cookies.

Happy Baking!