Weddingbee Blog

I asked Sister Pug to give a behind-the-scenes detailed look at the creation of our wedding cake cookie towers (WCCT), which served as our escort card favors.

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After extensive taste-testing (mostly by Mr. Pug), we decided upon the lime sugar and lavender sugar cookies. But I wasn’t going to just start kickin’ out WCCTs without some extensive preliminary calculations. Based on the size of the cellophane bags I was provided (read: one of the hundreds of boxes that just appeared on my doorstep, courtesy of some furious internet shopping by the Pug), I calculated the size of the cookies that would fit in the bag, and decided to do a mockup.

Then I figured that if I was going to go through the effort of doing a mockup, I may as well do it as accurately as possible, because can you imagine if at the end of all that they didn’t f’in fit in the bags. So I ‘made’ some out of cardboard and wrapped them in paper to make them more cookie-like.

Two options: three cookies on bottom, or two. I kinda liked the symmetry of the 2 and 2, but it looked chintzy, like I ran out of cookies. Pug made the decision - 3 and 2. And thank goodness, they fit.

FAST FORWARD A FEW MONTHS (‘let’s do the time warp agaaaaain’). I decided to make these babies last minute, since I was convinced the whole bake-and-freeze process faded the flavors. Oh ok, so really, it’s because I spaced out and all of a sudden was like - CRAP THERE WILL BE NO FAVORS IF I DON’T GET MY BAKING ASS IN GEAR.

Essential Tools: (1) flat, old school, rolling pin and clever little device that keeps dough of uniform thickness

(2) professional-style, synthetic, nonstick ‘Exoglass’ round cookie

I will merely mention here that I had carefully calculated the absolute square footage of dough I was going to need, after re-visiting some grade-school equations involving pi, but still ended up with, oh, approximately 3 times as much dough as I needed. Hehe. Guess I should’ve paid more attention in Geometry.

Look how perfectly round they are, courtesy of the Exoglass. Just makes my heart swell with pride.

After cooling, it was time to frost these little coins of happiness.

I used a basic royal icing recipe and added gel food coloring - light green for the lime, and light purple for the lavender, cookies.

The key was to pipe the icing (with a #5 tip, for more precision) around the perimeter first, and fill in centripetally. Then smooth with spatula dipped in water IMMEDIATELY (I conscripted the husband to be my spatula-bitch). Note: I figured out halfway into a panic-stricken sheet that piping a whole buncha cookies before smoothing was a baaaaaad idea - the icing just dried too fast. Those got used for the bottom layers.

Once thoroughly dried, Pug and I assembled them with dollops of additional royal icing into magnificent WCCTS!

For the crowning touch, I made some violet-type flowers to go on top, but that’s another whole chapter in my crazy checkered past. Ta-da!

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See? See how inferior she makes me feel? And who uses the word “centripetally”?