Sweet Holiday!

Well we're almost here. One more day until Christmas Eve and I've been baking up a storm for days. Can't wait to dig into all of the sweetness tomorrow!

Today I'll be busy getting ready for my hosting duties. I just found out that I'll have some overnight guests tonight so the festivities will be starting sooner than I thought. Better get a move on!

Wishing you and your loved ones a most joyous holiday filled with lots of goodness & cheer! xoxo

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Take Two

Good morning lovelies! Hope you all had a wonderful evening.

So last night didn't turn out exactly as planned. After running around to pick up xmas gifts and stopping by the grocery store to get baking supplies, we came home and realized that we forgot to get butter! Seriously we're brilliant. So rather than run back out to the store at 8:30 to get butter that would need to then be defrosted, we decided to officially postpone cookie baking until today.

We did, however, manage to squeeze in a few other baking projects that I had on the agenda. I made apple pie, brownies and, what I'm most excited about, I made Peppermint Bark for the very first time!

I don't know about you all but I seriously LOVE peppermint bark. There's something oh so delicious about the layers of chocolate and mint. Oh Williams-Sonoma, thanks for helping add an additional 5 lbs to the yearly holiday bulge ;)

I couldn't contain my excitment when I came across this recipe last week on The City Sage. How fabulous, right? I figured that it looked simple enough to make. Why not give it a shot? I could package it up and give out to our guests on xmas eve as an extra little treat.

Well I'm happy to report that everything went smoothly. It really didn't take much time at all to make. And it looks amazing! I haven't tasted it yet but I'm hopefully that it will be delicious. But maybe I should stop by Williams-Sonoma on my way home tonite to pick up some of theirs as backup...

Do you have any baking projects on tap this holiday?

Images: found here, here & here

Cookie Craving

Well it's finally here. The night that I used to look forward to more than any other night of the year, but after many years and years, has become the most dreaded night of the year. Christmas Cookie Night!

It's funny, I seriously used to love decorating all of the cookies. It was a major creative outlet for me. I even would hold cookie decorating parties so we could do it a few times during the holiday season. But something happened along the way. It became a major chore. I don't know if it's because our lives are more hectic than they used to be. Or if it's because it is expected of us. Our families would seriously kill us if we decided to skip this tradition. And believe me, we have tried to many times. Just. Not. Happenin! Oh an I won't even go into the fact that not only do we have to bake and decorate cookies tonight but then we are expected to bake some cookies and leave them undecorated so we can have a separate decorating party with J's family on xmas eve.

Well this year I'm determined to bring the joy back to cookie decorating. Why dread something that used to give us so much joy? We even picked up some new tools to spice things up this year. I'm loving the new Williams-Sonoma Message-in-a-Cookie Holiday Cookie Cutters and I must admit that I'm pretty excited to give them a whirl tonight. Oh and we also get to use one of our wedding gifts, the Williams-Sonoma Marble Rolling Pin. We've been dying to get one of these for years. Let the fun begin!

And in the spirit of sharing, I figured that I'd share with all of you the famous Dawn & Jen's Sugar Cookie recipe. People tell us all the time that it's the best sugar cookie recipe they've ever had so I figure why not spread the love around. It's the same recipe that we gave out to our wedding guests as favors. I think we need to come up with a snapier name for the recipe but for now it'll have to do :)

Dawn & Jen's Sugar Cookies

2 sticks butter (room temp)

1 c sugar

2 eggs

1 tbsp. vanilla extract

3 c flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

• Use an electric mixer to beat together the butter and sugar until creamy.
• Add the eggs and beat well.
• Beat in vanilla extract.
• In another bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and salt.
• Beat the flour mixture into the wet mixture slowly, one-third at a time.
• Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour.
• Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
• Sprinkle flour onto work surface and rolling pin.
• Divide the dough into quarters.
• Roll each quarter to about 1/4" thick.
• Use cookie cutters to cut out shapes.
• Sprinkle on decoration.
• Bake 5-10 minutes.
• If frosting cookies, bake first, let cool and then frost.

Frosting

1/2 c butter (room temp)

1 lb confectionary sugar

1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

4 tbsp. milk

• Place butter in a bowl.
• Add confectionary sugar, vanilla and milk.
• Mix until smooth.
• If frosting is too loose add more confectionary sugar.
• If frosting is too stiff add more milk.
• Add your favorite food coloring or use sprinkles on top of frosting.

And the rest is up to you. Oh I can see those creative juices flowing already :)

Oh and if you have any favorite cookie recipes to share, I'd just love to hear them!

Images: 1, 2-4, 5

Our Wedding - Cookie Table

Well here we are finally...the end of the recaps! Today I'm wrapping them up with the cookie favor table.

And of course, there's a story to why we chose to do a cookie bar as our favors. I've mentioned this before, so forgive me for repeating myself, but we're kinda known amongst our friends and family as being the "Christmas Cookie Experts" because we make and decorate sugar cookies every year. So we thought "wouldn't it be a great idea to make our cookie recipe in the shape of a wedding cake and enclose our recipe as our favor?" Fab idea, right? Well not really when you get into thinking about the logistics of making 200 cookies right before your wedding. Could have been a deal breaker but luckily we have our amazing friends, Court & Nat, who volunteered to take over that task for us. They seriously were lifesavers and did an absolutely amazing job!

Check out their beautiful work!

Now I'm gonna take you back to about 2 weeks before the wedding. Everything was all set as far as favors were concerned. We had a plan in action, cookie trials were complete, supplies were purchased. Truth be told, we really should have stopped thinking about cookies. But nope, not us. We came up with the brilliant idea to expand the whole cookie idea and to have a cookie table with two of our favorite traditional family recipes. Luckily our family members were game and agreed to make those cookies as well. Talk about pressing your luck!

My Yia made her amazing Greek Koulourakia. They're seriously to die for!

And Jen's sister made her family's Norwegian Krumkake. This is a Christmas staple in her family. Just delish!

And of course I couldn't stop there. I just had to get maroon colored m&ms so that our guests could top off their goody bags :)

The final product

So that about wraps it up for the wedding recaps. Hope you all enjoyed the peak into our day. And thanks so much for all the comments & feedback. I loved hearing what you all thought! xoxo

All images: Daniel Krieger

Crunch Time

Just for the weekend. I'm not going for good or for an extended period of time or anything...

It's the final weekend before the wedding and we have a lot of last minute things to take care of. Good thing we can do a lot of the things indoors because Tropical Storm Danny is going to make for a pretty rainy weekend.

Projects include making a photo list, ordering prints from the E session to display at the reception, putting vacation photos in frames for table themes, deciding which other photos to display, tracking down more frames, writing the sizes on the flip flop hang tags, labeling water bottles & chocolates, deciding attendant walking/standing order, write thank you notes for OOT bags, starting to assemble OOT bags & attendant gift bags, buy maroon colored M&Ms for cookie table (I know it's a cookie table but we wanted to give some candy away too :)), and possibly, if the labels and bags come in today, we'll put the monogram labels on the cookie bags.

Quite a lot to do but I know I'll feel so much better after we accomplish all of this.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Image: found here

Treats For Our Sweets

I've been totally consumed these past few weeks with all the little details that will make our guests feel comfortable, happy & extra spoiled. Be it the NY themed out of towner gift bags (I'd love to add this cute cookie favor above from One Girl Cookies. I'm totally obsessed with all things NY and I'm even going to add little Bacardi Big Apple Rum bottles), the flip flop & bathroom baskets (J thinks I'm crazy wanting to add makeup remover & cotton balls and hair gel. She doesn't think that people will really need that stuff at the wedding) or the ever expanding cookie table (originally we were just going to do our sugar cookie recipe as a favor but now it's expanded to Jen's family's Norwegian Krumkae and my family's Greek Koulourakia and we'll probably have some maroon & possibly aqua or teal colored m&ms in cookie jars on the table too).

I swear the more time you have before the wedding actually happens, the more things get added to the list! I'm just hoping that all of our guests have a wonderful time and like all the extra treats.

Dancin Queens

Happy Monday! Hope you all had a great weekend. We had a great girls nite out on Saturday and we also managed to make a bit of progress on the wedding to do list.

Saturday, in addition to making J one of her favorite treats, fried squash blossoms, we went to Old Navy and bought about 32 pairs of flip flops for our guests who are in need of comfy dancin shoes. They were on sale for a great price - 2 for $5 plus we had a 30% off friends and family coupon. Not bad, not bad!

We also went to the NY Cake & Baking Distributor store to pick up some supplies for the cookie favor trial that we will be having with our friends on Tuesday. I just love that place. It's a bakers paradise filled to the brim with baking & decorating supplies.

Then later that night a bunch of our friends and family came out take us out for dinner, drinks & dancing. The night was pretty eventful and we had an amazing time.

After the fun & excitement Saturday we decided to take a break a relax on Sunday. It was raining most of the day so we stayed inside, sat on the couch and watched wedding tv all day. We love those kinda days and we haven't had a chance to have one in months so it was a real treat. I'm sure it's the last one that we'll be having for a while since the wedding's only 5 weels away from yesterday!

Image: Jimmy Backius

Cute Cookie Alternative

Here's another option for our favors that I found on Two Brunettes. Much less icing than I was originally thinking but this could work...

Image: found here via Mer Mag

Cookie Time!

So way back when we came up with the brilliant idea of cookie favors. Now I know this isn't a unique idea or anything but there's a bigger story here. I mentioned a while back that we're known amongst our friends and family as being the "Christmas Cookie Experts" because we make and decorate sugar cookies every year so there was no way that we could just buy ready made cookies.

Every year we have a cookie decorating party with friends during the holidays and we make and decorate cookies with our niece and nephews every Christmas Eve. And we're really serious about the decorating. No simple sprinkling of sugar. We're all about the details. It usually takes hours and hours for just a few batches of cookies because we're so meticulous about them.

Well we struggled with the idea for a long time wondering how on earth would we be able to take on such a huge task right before the wedding. Unfortuntaely I won't have that much time off before the wedding so it really seemed like an impossible idea and I was just about ready to give up on it altogether. But then I came across this Wedding Cake Cookie Cutter Texture Set and my hopes were restored.

You can get the beautiful texture detail pretty effortlessly. You simply ice the cookie with a thick, smooth layer of buttercream. Once the icing crusts you place the mat on top of the cookie and press. Et voila!

Still the thought of making 175 cookies right before the wedding is a pretty daunting task but we're lucky enough to have amazing friends who have offered to help us out with this project. Love you girls! Cookie trials are coming soon!

Sweet Favors

I've been debating what to give our guests as favors. Originally I was thinking cookies. We're known to our friends and family as being the "Christmas Cookie Experts" because we make and decorate sugar cookies every year. It's even become tradition to have a cookie decorating party with friends during the holidays and to make and decorate cookies with our niece and nephews every Christmas Eve. So it seemed only natural for cookies to be the choice favor since it's something that represents us.

Then I started thinking of the logistics of it all. I would want the cookies to be our recipe and to include the recipe on a card or label or hang tag. But it seems like a huge task to take on so close to the wedding. My planner Lindsay suggested packing up dry ingredients in a canister and attaching directions to add the wet ingredients. While this is a good suggestion, I'm still not sold on the idea.

So then I started thinking do we just have a favor bar? Offering a variety of different sweet treats - cookies & candy? I'd love to hear what you think.

Images: brides.com, marthastewart.com