Wedding update

Our rings have shipped, we bought them off Etsy from this store. Fed Ex ground is not being the best at updating where they are, we know they left Saint Paul MN on Friday night but haven't had an update since. My local FedEx guy said FedEx ground was the unwanted stepchild of FedEx.

After the harrowing experience of ordering our centre pieces off Ebay, they arrived wonderfully. They're a bit bigger than what Sweetie was thinking and I love that they don't look cheap.The colored tulle arrived so we can take the ugly pink (I don't like pink) bows off the arch we got for a steal & replace them with green & blue ones :)

We have our guest book, my dress, favor bags, cookie recipes & vows are written. All over venues & vendors are booked, just need a final confirmation from them. 82 days until the big day!

In baking news I've made my own granola bars, tweaked this recipe from Allrecipes. I didn't have rolled oats, just quick outs. Tasted good but didn't taste like store bought. I added 3-4 Tablespoons of ground flax to my dry ingredients. My 2 cups of stuff were: mini chocolate chips, craisens, dried cherries & sliced almonds. I did what some of the commenters were saying & flattened it pretty good before going into the oven, and flattening it again once it was out. I didn't have any issues with crumbling. MM MM tasty.

I ventured into banana muffins this weekend, I only had 2 banana's so the ones I made could have had more of that flavor. I split the sugar between white & brown, used half whole wheat flour & added a Tablespoon of flax & a dash of mini chocolate chips to this recipe. I also added a bit of cinnamon & nutmeg. The oven time isn't correct at all from what the commenters were saying, I only had my muffins in the oven for about 20 min. Toothpick came out clean. I resisted the urge to frost them with a peanut butter buttercream. Gotta fit into that wedding dress ya know.

Coooooooookies

Somewhere along the line we decided on cookies for favors. It was supposed to be an economical from the heart kind of thing. With this decision made, and stuck in my head now it was off to decide what kind of cookies.

I've been reading a lot of baking/cooking blogs since before Christmas and one of the things that kept amazing me was iced cookies. Since the theme is Rainbows & Unicorns I thought I could make some cookies that looked like rainbows & unicorns. Somewhere on ebay I found a pony cutter that kind of looked like a unicorn so I snapped that up. It's a double layer cutter so it cuts the outline then imprints the shape of a pony in that outline. Pretty neat.

My idea for the rainbows was pretty simple; get 2 different sized circle cutters, take out the smaller circle & then cut the doughnut shape in half. That worked out real well with a bonus of having a round cookie that I can monogram too.

The first recipe I tried was Sugarbakers' Chocolate Mini-Chip Cookies that was recommended to me by Jessie at Cakespy (randomly contacted her off her blog & she responded so fast!). After seeing what Sugarbelle can do with cutters & icing I bookmarked her blog too. I only had regular chocolate chips & margarine on hand. I don't know if it's the winter dry Edmonton climate but my 2 cups of flour made for quite the dry mix. I'll be trying this one again with the recommended unsalted butter & mini chips (in rainbow if I can find them) and probably a wee bit less than 2 cups of flour.

This failed batch was so dry I couldn't roll it out to cut it, so I formed 2 massive cookies and fresh out of the oven I just used one circle cutter on them. That worked out well, they tasted like chocolate chip cookies but had a flaky almost pie crust like texture.  


The icing I used for this was found on I Am Baker. It was very simple to remember & I thought the corn syrup would give it a taste that everyone would love. I found it quite sweet, but then I also forgot the drop of lemon juice. I still liked it but I know others wouldn't be so fond of it. I iced some of the failed cookies and went on to play some Rock Band & Cranium with my sweetie & his brother & cousin.

I'm new here

Hi!

I'm new here. This is my first post. To keep my sanity I'll be talking mainly about the things that keep me up at night. Trying to filter them out so I can sleep. Don't get me wrong, most of them are ideas for things or things I want to do - not crazy ramblings. Ok there will probably be crazy ramblings.

A little background info:

I'm getting married in 129 days. Never thought this time last year I'd be getting married. It was a whirlwind courtship, we're both in our 30's and it feels right.

As of now we have everything booked, we've put our deposits down & the dresses are ordered. That's the main thing. Currently the mental lists are about budget, the favors & just general worry of how everything is going to go.

We've decided for it to be a dry wedding, which hasn't sat well with my family as there's a lot of lushes there. We also don't want childrens about because neither of like them. Almost all the cousins I'm inviting (cause I'm not inviting all of them) have childrens under 5. We're offering my mothers house a haven for them with a couple of child sitters so hopefully that'll work.

The invites go out tonight so I'll find out how dissapointed the cousins are about not having their childrens allowed.

We went with a wax monogram of our new last name to add a special touch to the invites. We also went non traditional on the invite, the first page is a brief Story of Courtship that the man mainly came up with. The second page is all the details regarding the wedding, lodging etc. The first page is pretty green/gold shimmer velum.

Ye gods this is getting long. Next post I shall discuss favors!