Wedding cookies, or, Why I still can't move my fingers

About a month ago, I was asked to make cookies for the president of the library's daughter's wedding on October 1st. Like a fool, I agreed. 240 cookies. I've never made that many at one time before. The birthday cookies I made in June were only 3 dozen. This was 20 dozen cookies!! In the shape of wedding cakes and wedding cakes with heart toppers. The heart toppers scared me. I knew there would be casualties. There were only a few actually. Luckily I only had to decorate in two colors, red and white. I left them fairly simple, with easy-ish designs, and two colors, plus black for writing. Here's how the process went over a two week period.

So, two weekends before the wedding, I spent two days baking the cookies. I, like a fool, thought I could get about 3 dozen cookies from one batch of dough. Wrong! I got about half that amount in each batch, and ended up using 8 pounds of butter, over 10 pounds of flour, six pounds of confectioners sugar (for the cookies only), and over a dozen eggs. Then I had to empty out my freezer so that I could store them for the next couple of weeks.

The cookies were picked up Friday Sept. 30th, so on the Wednesday before, I pulled all of the cookies out and laid them out to thaw.

While thawing, I whipped up the royal icing, using about 3 pounds total. I made an outline and a flood consistency for the white, and three consistencies for the red. I made flowers with one, and needed it super thick.

Wednesday night, I outlined and flooded all of the cookies, which took about 10 hours, and that's with 3 hours of help from my husband.

Thursday afternoon, I decorated the cookies with the icings and sugar pearls I had stashed away that I hadn't used yet.

On Friday morning, I got up super early to box the cookies. I bought bakery boxes, but they were pretty flimsy. I supported the bottoms with cardboard, and actually had to create cardboard separaters for the heart-topped cookies to protect them.

The happy couple picked them up on Friday afternoon, and from what I heard, they went over very well on the big day!