A friend asked me to make some wedding favours for her – either cupcakes or cookies. Cupcakes would have been great but we had to fly from Wellington to Auckland, and then they’d have to get transported via ferry to the venue on Waiheke Island. Auckland is also notorious for its humid summers so I ruled out making frosted cupcakes pretty quickly. So cookies it was.

The original plan was to make gingerbread ones because I know the gingerbread recipe I have is delicious. However, we experienced a bit of humidity ourselves here in Wellington and my trial cookies turned into cake. They became so soft that they fell apart if you tried to pick them up! So we went for a simple sugar cookie by Alton Brown which proved hardier and still yummy.

100-something cookies

After several test runs of different icing colours and patterns, the final product was a heart flooded with light pink icing, and piped with blue and dark pink criss crossing. I have to say the hardest thing about all this was the piping. I almost gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome again from the hours of piping to achieve the stripes – my hands ached and started tingling that night.

The iced wedding cookies – not bad for a novice

But it was worth it. They looked really nice on the tables and tasted pretty good too.

The table layout