A friend of a friend contacted me in July, wanting to order cookies for her wedding reception favors at the end of October. I jumped at the chance, wanting to finally be able to say, “I’ve done a wedding,” when people ask. (I had made cookies for a rehearsal dinner before as a gift, but that was as close as I’d gotten.) Meagan and I began communicating, and we became fast friends over the next few months. 🙂

Meagan needed about 300 cookies, but because the cookies needed to travel all the way from Minot, North Dakota, to the deep-south Georgia, I made plenty of extras “just in case.” I made an entire extra dough’s worth of cookies, giving her a total of 331 cookies.

I only have two 1/2-sheet baking pans, but I used every other pan in my collection, as well as the plastic lids, to lay out as many cookies as possible at a time. What you see above is about 1/4 of the cookies before decorating. (And iTunes, of course. Handy-dandy iTunes is what makes most of my nights possible. I swear, these cookies wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have showtunes to sing-along with!)

And here’s a bit less than another 1/4 of the cookies, spread out on all my cooling racks. I have four stackable ones, as well as three smaller racks. There’s also a TON of cookies ready-to-go, stored in those ice cream buckets you see on the counter.

Meagan had seen some leaf cookies I had done in the past, and she decided that was the perfect shape for her favors. She sent me some color swatches so I could match the orange, red, and brown in her wedding colors.

I decided to go with a simple wet-on-wet technique for the swirly background, as I thought that a set pattern would distract from the monogrammed ‘B’ for their last name. I was so pleased with how elegant they turned out, and I constantly waffled back & forth over whether the red or orange leaves were my favorite.

Meagan sent me a sample of the font used in her wedding invitations, and I modeled the ‘B’ monograms as closely as possible to them. After drawing 325+ of them, I’m pretty sure I could pipe these in my sleep! 😉

When the order was all said & done, I packed up the cookies carefully and loaded them into the back of my vehicle. Seven boxes (12’x12’x8′, by the way) almost fills the back hatch of my Sportage! It’s a lot of cookies! All the planning & prep work paid off when the cookies arrived with 2 full days to spare. And though I had sent about 30 extras, they only found 5 cracked cookies when opening all the boxes in Georgia… AWESOME! 😀

And now, Meagan & Cody have been married for just over one month, and I couldn’t be happier for this sweet, cute couple! ♥

If you haven’t yet entered “My Favorite Things!” Giveaway, make sure you pop over to do that. I’ll start drawing prizes tomorrow night (Friday, the 2nd), and you don’t want to miss out! 🙂