Weddingbee

Today’s entry of diy wedding cake cookies comes from Miss Popcorn!

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I had two of my best girlfriends over to help me make about 70 units of cookie favours for my wedding. Each favour consisted of two bigger cookies and two smaller cookies stacked with icing between them to form mini wedding “cakes.”

We began with a shortbread cookie recipe taken, of all things, from the back of a corn starch box.

I’d made it before and found it troublesomely soft, so when we made double batches for the Cookie Bonanza, I threw in an extra 1/4 cup flour for each double batch, making the recipe:

1+1/2 cup butter, softened
2+1/4 cup flour
1 cup corn starch
1 cup icing sugar

Mixing and rolling out the dough

Sift the dry ingredients together in your stand mixer bowl*, add the butter and cut through a few times with your spatula so it doesn’t go poof as soon as you run the mixer. Process the ingredients together with the mixer at the lowest speed until it all comes together in a dough. There will likely be dryer bits at the bottom that you will have to work in by hand. Turn it out onto plastic cling wrap, work in the dry bits and wrap. Refrigerate for at least an hour before using. We made 7 such batches, but didn’t use it all. We estimate that if we used it all, it would have been enough for about 100 units.

[*I specify a stand mixer, and honestly, I don’t advise undertaking such a large quantity of cookies mixing by hand. However, if you want to try this recipe by hand, you’ll have an easier time handling it if you half it.]

Once the dough had been refrigerated long enough we were ready to roll it. The stuff can be sticky, so we found the easiest and quickest way to handle was to work on parchment paper:

• lay out a sheet of parchment and dust with flour and/or corn starch
• throw a half a batch of dough on at a time and briefly work it just enough to soften a bit, but still keep it cold
• throw a second sheet of parchment paper on top and roll the dough between the sheets using a rolling pin
• have a friend hold diagonal corners of the parchment in place while you roll across the other diagonal until your dough is rolled out to the desired thickness, which is 1/4″ or a little more
• remove the top sheet of parchment and dust a little more flour/corn starch on it and roll a bit more if needed
• cut: dip your cutters in flour/corn starch before each cut to avoid sticking and start cutting circles
• if you have worked quickly and the dough hasn’t warmed up, it will be easier to peel away the scraps from around the circles
• put the cut circles in the freezer
• once cookies have frozen firm, they are ready to be transfered to cookie sheets to bake
• parchment can be reused over and over, but dough will stick to it, so scrape it off with a straight sided rigid spatula
• have a flexible spatula to scrape down the rolling pin if dough bits become stuck to it

Baking

The recipe called for a 300 degree Fahrenheit oven, but for more even baking of multiple sheets we used a convection oven, also at 300, because although it’s normal to dock 25 degrees when using convection, my oven doesn’t go any lower for convection.

Anyway, no greasing or lining of the cookie sheets is required for the recipe (they are, after all FULL of butter) but so that cookies could be laid out in formation before a cookie sheet was free, we laid them out on sheets of parchment. (Parchment can be reused multiple times.) As mentioned above, the cookies are frozen before transferring to baking position, because otherwise, they’re too squishy and sticky to move. These cookies do grow a little while baking, so leave almost a half inch between them.

Depending on your oven and whether or not you use convection the bake time is 20 to 35 minutes. They are done when the most hawk-eyed of the bakers in the room detects the faintest hint of browning on an edge of a cookie.

Cool completely on cookie racks before frosting.

Icing and assembly

I made a simple icing of lemon juice and icing sugar. I didn’t measure for this, I simply squeezed the juice of half a lemon for each batch, strained the seeds, and mixed icing sugar into it until it was thick enough not to run: somewhere on the order of 2+1/5 cups of icing sugar I think. Just add more lemon juice or a little more icing sugar depending on how it looks.

To assemble, we iced together the large cookies and small cookies in pairs, and once the icing had set, iced the small ones on top of the big ones. We just put a small dollop of icing in the middle of each cookie and then twisted them together to distribute the icing.

Once the fully assembled “cakes” were set (and this icing sets firm relatively quickly) we were ready to wrap.

Wrapping

Each “cake” was wrapped in a square of cellophane wrap and tied with a simple bow. I even have special tips for this part!

• To cut out ribbon, find out how long each piece should be, and cut a piece to use as template. Put all your spools of ribbon on a screwdriver and while one person holds it, the other can pull several lengths of ribbon measuring against the template and snip.
• To tie, take a long length of twist tie and wind tightly around the cinched cellophane to hold it shut while you tie the ribbon, and then remove the twist tie.

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