The Petunias took Miss Lollipop’s advice to heart and realized that we should put one of our intended projects to the test, sort of.For many of our our of town guests, the trip to Florida for our wedding will be their first visit to the state, so we think grouping the welcome items together for the OOT bags under a Florida & beach theme makes sense, even if we’re not having a beach-themed wedding in general.
One of the things we’d like to include in the bags is homemade Key Lime Sugar cookies, so I purchased this cookie cutter in the shape of Florida from The Cookie Cutter Shop. (I believe they have all states represented and other adorable cookie cutters, too!).

Now Mr. Petunia and I weren’t fully prepared yet to make rolled and cut cookies: I’d never made cookies from scratch before at all! We did think we could handle some basic peanut butter cookies as our first experiment though, so out came Mr. Petunia’s gift to me from two Chrismukkahs ago:

All in all, the cookies came out alright: we’d give them a B-. Taste was yummy, but the cookies were a bit dry, I must admit…



Here’s what we learned after doing some research on the Internet:
1. Many people cut down the flour in a baking recipe by about 1/4 so that they end up with moister cookies
2. Once you add the flour to the mixer, you are supposed to stop mixing THE MINUTE the flour seems to disappear. Apparently, it’s bad news to keep mixing and mixing once the flour can no longer be seen
3. Because of some chemical reaction (I knew I should have paid attention in high school Chemistry…) or something, you should leave your butter out for a while until it’s at room temperature and not use right-out-of-the-refrigerator-cold butter
Although altogether the cookies weren’t bad, we certainly hope they will be much better the next time around. In the meantime, we’d love to hear any good baking tips from the experts out there!
You might try throwing the dough in the freezer for about 10 minutes before you bake with it. It depends on the recipe, but with my fave chocolate chip cookies, the dough will spread and burn faster in the oven if it’s too warm going in. Chill dough makes the cookies fluffier.
Take that with a grain of salt, though. I know next-to-nothing about baking anything that doesn’t have chocolate chips in it. : )
Cute favor idea, too!