Commission Tales: United Way Rocks!

Just finished up a large-ish commission last week for one of my corporate clients, making 225 hand-decorated sugar cookies for their 2013 United Way campaign kick-off.

Considering the original order request was for 1500 cookies, a "mere" 20 dozen was far easier!

This much, doubled....ay yay yay....!

I made a classic rolled sugar cookie recipe (EIGHT TIMES the original, mind you...whew!) that is very sturdy yet quite flavourful, and can be tarted up quite easily with any flavouring you like. They hold up beautifully to being decorated with royal icing, too! You can find the recipes I used for Rolled Sugar Cookies and Royal Icing here.

The design was to complement their United Way campaign theme for the year, which was "eXplorers" and using superlatives with the letter "X" in them, such as "eXemplary!" and "eXceptional!" to describe employees' outstanding service. The company also had an "eXplorers" themed virtual scavenger hunt (think treasure map-style) that I thought would be fun to mirror in the cookies themselves.

Many pounds of sugar cookie dough!

Rolling the dough to 1/4" thickness

Dozens of rounds cut and baked off (19 dozen, in fact!)

   

Black Royal Icing circles to hold in the flood icing

White flood icing bases

Each cookie had a stylized "X" carefully piped on the dry surface

Each "X" was filled in with red flood icing

When all was dry, each cookie was painted with a custom, hand-drawn "map"

<--- What 20 dozen cookies looks like!

 

 

 

What 20 dozen cookies look like all together! Plus this --->

I'm so glad I was given this commission, as it was a lot of fun!  I'm also incredibly thankful for the unswerving, untiring assistance of my great friend, Erinith, for patiently helping me to flood and paint these cookies, not to mention be with me for the very early morning delivery (after being up nearly all night!). She has her own blog, Balancing on the Edge of the Nerdsphere, which you are welcome to visit.