Zoning

I found myself in the zone once again last night. This time, over sugar cookies. You know how it goes, get home from work, take a nap, overshoot the landing and wake up four hours later, then decide you have to make up for lost time.

Five hours later, you've baked and iced 158 sugar cookies only to crawl back into bed covered in sugar, flour, and a sense of accomplishment having just stuck it to LIFE. SEE LIFE? I CAN be a productive human being!

Allow me to back up a little bit...

Last Christmas, Dubs made some phenom sugar cookies and brought them to work. I verbally abused her until she gave me the recipe and I found an awesome recipe for royal icing that doesn't taste vile and together, they make the absolute best sugar cookie in both flavor and looks.

I quadrupled the batch of sugar cookie dough to make sure I would have enough. My goal was to make enough cookies for the guests staying at the cottages for the wedding weekend, which we calculated to be approximately 50 people, including the families of the bride and groom.

I used a Virginia cookie cutter, because they are getting married by Charlottesville, so I stuck a little heart where Charlottesville is-ish and then made a larger heart with their initials on it.

The greatest part about using the royal icing is that you get that awesome look of that smooth surface.

 Need some advice on royal icing? Check out SweetSugarbelle, a blog devoted to the art of sugar cookie-ing and it features some really great tutorials and tips.

I first drew outlines with the royal icing...

And then thinned the icing out with some water to get it really runny and "flooded" the cookie to fill in the shape.

Super easy, but it does take some time to dry...

But that's cool, I have to have background noise when I'm baking, so I was able to "watch" Barefoot In The Park, The Seven Year Itch, and last week's episode of Grey's Anatomy over the course of my baking marathon.

I probably should have taken that time to figure out what I'm going to say when I get up to give a toast at the wedding reception... :/

Meh, I've got five more days to figure that out.

Maybe I'll figure it out in the time it will take to package all of these cookies. :|