150 Mini Cakes

Ok, so they are 150 cake-shaped cookies. But I'm not sure that they didn't take longer than it would to make 150 mini cakes. Whew! These took days. I wish I had timed it. There was nothing "quick" about these cookies. Baking them took so long. Doesn't help that I have 3 cookie sheets and could get approximately 16 cookies in the oven at a time. Icing them took many hours. Decorating took less, but still a while. Then bagging them... more time. But you know what? I still enjoyed it! (Mostly. There was some stress, hoping I'd finish, hoping they'd dry, etc) I really like making cookies but they are time consuming. Here's my journey...

I knew I needed to bake them early on in the week. Monday night I needed to make the dough because it has to be refrigerated over night. I start after work, around 11 pm. Check this out:

That's sugar and shortening. Hint: it should be white.

See the black stuff on my fingers? Turns out you're not supposed to wash that beater in the dishwasher. Took me forever to find in the manual where it said that. It should really be somewhere on the beater. See I have an Artisan mixer that has a white beater that is dishwasher safe so I didn't even think about it. But when you put this in the dishwasher a bunch of black stuff rubs off... I don't know all the technicalities. Well it rubbed off into about 4 cups of sugar and 2 cups of shortening. No big deal. If you saw my previous post, I don't mind wasting large amounts of ingredients :(

So what do I do? This dough needs to be made. My other kitchenaid is smaller and full of chocolate icing in the fridge... I end up scrubbing the beater until all the black stuff is gone. Moral of this experience: I'm getting a new one. A nice one that scraps the bowl while mixing and is dishwasher safe. What's annoying? That Bed, Bath, and Beyond carries the beater I want... just not at any of the locations within 50 miles of me. Ugh. So it's ordered. Who knows when I'll get it. 

That's only 2/5ths of the dough I ended up using

Glad I got the 25lb bag of flour!

 The next day I begin to bake:

Did I mention I could only bake maybe 16 at a time? And it took me a while to get into my groove and get the cookies to bake how I liked them.

Oh and I usually had two pans in the oven at a time. I had just taken out 2 and was grabbing the third, not hot, pan to load it up with cookie dough... but I grabbed one of the really hot ones straight out of the oven! Yeah... Smooth right? I put my hand under cold water for a few minutes, then put it on ice. Fortunately that helped a lot! You can barely see where I got burned. You can see red on my ring and pinky finger and on the left of my palm. I know it doesn't look bad, but I get burned... often. It could've been very bad. The place on my ring finger started to blister, but fortunately none of them were bad. All better now!

First comes the outlining.

Then filling in the lines.

Then decorations!!

(sorry for the goofy sizing, but that way you can see the cookies better)

Surely you can see how there was no space in my kitchen. And I was still baking and working on cakes during this time... Fun!

All done!! Oh wait, they have to be bagged and tied too!

Honestly, Saturday morning when I woke up I needed to completely do the wedding and groom's cake: ice decorate, stack, make a bow, dip the strawberries etc. But I would've rather just sat down and bagged these cookies. I knew they were good to go and there was no more stress associated with these. Cakes were another story. Don't worry, I did work on the cakes :)

All done and ready to go. 

That's the fun adventure that were these cookies. I've had a few people ask me about cookies since I posted pictures so that's got to be a good sign!

Now the wedding and groom's cake :)