Cookies, Cupcakes and Craft. Oh my!

The wedding planning has kinda stalled. We are at the point where we have a lot of things planned and now we just have to wait to make everything. Though there are still things we need to decide on.
We need to:

• decide on a ceremony site
• decide on our first dance song
• plan out the ceremony
• decide what the guys are wearing
• bunch of other little things

I spent this weekend doing wedding stuff. I had a long weekend, having taken Thursday and Friday off work. I started with a trip to Jo Ann for some crafting supplies. While wandering around in a part of the store I never visit, I found an isle dedicated to weddings crafts. It amused me. With invitation kits, veil making kits and little flowers to tie onto favors, it made me wonder what kind of bride would shop this isle? A truly crafty bride, like myself, doesn't need to shop for kits but makes everything from scratch. I just hope anyone who buys those kits knows that whatever element they made from that kit will not be unique to them. Anyway, I continued on to the scrapbooking section of Jo Ann and bought several blue papers and a small dowel for center pieces. I also stopped at a grocery store for ingredients for strawberry lemonade cupcakes, a different strawberry lemonade buttercream, marshmallow fondant and spritz cookies.

The Invintations

Admittedly, we have over a year until the invitations have to be mailed out but when you're doing everything yourself, the sooner you get things done, the better. I guess I started designing the invitations during this outing I went on with my future mother in law, Maria, near the beginning of the engagement. Maria and I went to the fabric store and Paper Zone. At Paper Zone, they have idea boards. On one was a three layer invitation; a background card stock, a medium color and the main paper. What a novel idea. I liked it. I picked out paper. Maria bought me samples. We even discussed size and looked at envelopes. After that outing, though, I left the invitations alone. I didn't need to worry about them for months, a year even.

Ok, so, we still don't have a budget (I promise this is relevant to the topic). In an attempt to figure out how much money we'd need for this wedding, I went out one Saturday and looked at the prices of things. I went to Cash and Carry to price dishes and food, Jo Ann to price fabric, ribbons, and brownie making things, and went to Paper Zone to price things for the invitations and the flowers (more on that later). I wandered around Paper Zone, notebook in hand, looking at the paper I had already picked out, envelopes and the like. It was then that I happened upon the square idea. I found square envelopes and thought “Hey, what a cool idea.” The next day I was reading iDIY, a do it yourselfer's wedding blog, and in a post, they had a link to a set of Photoshop brushes that really appealed to me and the style I wanted for the wedding. I then spent the rest of the afternoon downloading every font I found that also appealed to me.

The next weekend, armed with fonts, brushes, and new paper from Paper Zone, I set to work designing the invitations. With the help of my parents and little sister, I narrowed down the font choices from 30 to 3. By the end of the afternoon, I had a mockup of a 6.5”x6.5” invitation. The next day, I found out that a square envelope costs more in postage to send. I did the math, it would cost us around $10 more to send the square invites than rectangular ones. So now I've designed a 5”x8” invitation. It looks nice. This weekend, I'm going to print up a mockup just to make sure everyone likes the look, after another trip to Paper Zone of course.

The Cake

What's a wedding without a wedding cake? We'll have to find out since we're not actually having a big cake. A popular trend in weddings is to serve cupcakes and I'm taking it to the next level; mini cupcakes! I don't know why or how the idea got in my head but from the outset of the wedding planning I knew I was going to make mini cupcakes (not just mini cupcakes but a plethora of mini desserts actually). At first I wanted to make mini cheesecakes, mini pies, brownies on a stick, several flavors of truffles and the mini cupcakes to serve at the wedding but I have since thought about the daunting task of making all that (and the possible cost) and narrowed it down to the cupcakes, brownies on a stick (which I found a tutorial for here), and spitz cookies since my mom had gotten me a cookie press for Christmas this past year.

With the dessert list made, Lawrence and I had to make that huge decision every engaged couple has to make; which flavor of cake would we serve? I narrowed it down to two flavors and three recipes. Because we had already provided for the chocolate lovers with the brownies, I thought it best to have non-chocolate cupcakes. The fist cupcakes I made were orange vanilla bean cupcakes from Martha Stewart, though my test batch didn't include the vanilla bean because I could not find any at the grocery store. Lawrence loved the cupcakes and the Swiss meringue buttercream so we had cupcake number 1. I also wanted to have a strawberry cupcake since I absolutely love strawberries (so much so that I have them tattooed on me). I found a recipe for strawberry cream cheese cupcakes and one for strawberry lemonade cupcakes. I tried both. The strawberry cream cheese cupcakes were too moist and had seeds in them but the strawberry lemonade cupcakes were to die for though I somehow botched the frosting so that when I attempted to pipe frosting on to the cupcakes, the strawberries separated from the butter.

These are my attempts at cupcake making

The frosted orange vanilla cupcakes

What little strawberry lemonade cupcakes Lawrence left me to frost

The mostly frosted strawberry lemonade cupcakes

My first real attempt at piping. I couldn't pipe in a circle,

 there was always a side that ended up flat.

My spiky cupcake. I put a dot of frosting then pulled away.

I think I've finally decided that it will be ok if I don't pipe all the cupcakes and just use a knife or an offset spatula to frost them. No matter how the frosting gets on there, they'll still taste great!

Oh yeah, if you're asking "But Amy, where are you going to put a cake topper?" I have thought about this. A lot of couples who sever cupcakes in lieu of a big cake have a small cake made to cut but I thought that was silly (and out of my skill set). My plan is to make one regular sized cupcake of each kind of cupcake and put a bride pennant on the strawberry lemonade cupcake and a groom pennant on the orange vanilla one.