Save the Date Wedding Shower Cookies

Hi friends.

I promised you some more decorated cookies, and here they are! I apologize for there being only a few pictures of these, but last week was ridiculously busy (hence being MIA from the blog all week) and I was kind of haphazard with the picture-taking.

Hopefully you still get the idea.

We tried a new (semi-madeup) recipe for the cookies, which I won’t share with you because it wasn’t as successful as a roll-out recipe as I’d hoped. They tasted fine, but they weren’t the best for decorating. We had to re-cut them with the cookie cutter after they baked because they had spread so much, so the edges were a little ragged.

I should preface this by saying that the idea for the calendar cookies isn’t original to us. There are a few different examples out there, like this one from Haniela’s.

First off, we made the little hearts with the #5 on them. We made these on waxed paper a day ahead of decorating them. We used 20-second pink icing, but it would have been easier if it had been a little stiffer. Not as stiff as piping, but maybe 30-second or something. We put the pink icing in a decorating bag with a #2 round tip, and used a print-out of hearts I made as a Word document, which we put underneath the wax paper as a guide. I thought for sure I’d taken a picture of the hearts as we did them, but apparently not. We put on the 5’s with black piping icing and a #1 tip.

When it came to decorating the cookies, we made ivory icing, and had 2 consistencies– piping and 20-second. We started out by piping an outline with the stiffer icing. We could have skipped this and just used 20-second, but I wanted to make sure the edges stayed crisp.

Then we flooded it with 20-second icing using a squeeze bottle.

We then used a toothpick to smooth out the icing.

While the ivory was still wet, we used a piping bag fitted with a #1 round tip and 20-second black icing to create the lines of the calendar. This makes it dry flat with the ivory.

Our initial plan was to drop the hearts on right away after the lines were done so the heart would adhere nicely to the wet icing. This looked totally awesome for about 3 minutes, before the black started bleeding through the pink of the heart. Not. Cute.

So we had to wait until the next day when the icing was completely dry, and then used a dot of the ivory piping icing to stick the hearts on. This did give us some problems, though, as they didn’t lay as flat as they would have, and we had trouble with the hearts cracking when we tried to store them in a Tupperware container. So I think that if I did them again, I’d just pipe the heart directly on the dried calendar instead of making them ahead of time.

Then I piped “May” on the top of the cookie. We also made simple heart cookies to go along with them. We used the same 20-second icing that we used on the small hearts to decorate the larger hearts. They were looking a little boring, so I used Wilton color spray in red to give a little depth of color on one side. Again, forgot to take a picture of that. –> airhead.

Anyway, these were a hit at my friends Nate & Elizabeth’s shower. Stay tuned this week for more crafts from their shower!