A bride-to-be ordered 40 sets of Martha Stewart-style wedding cookie cakes for her upcoming bridal luncheon. I was looking forward to the project because I really do love making and decorating cookies. I started on them several days in advance, which is a good thing. It's surprising how much room, and how many cooling racks, those cookies took up during the baking and coating stages!
I used five batches of my favorite non-spreading cookie recipe. I cut out three 2.75" cookies, three 2" cookies, and two 1.25" cookies for each set (that's 320 cookies!). I rolled the dough to 3/16" inch thick, using a wooden dowel on either side of the dough and placing my rolling pin on the dowels to make sure the dough - and each cookie - was the same thickness throughout the project. Once they were cooled, they were coated with thinned royal icing and left to dry. After drying, each set was stacked with a dab of royal icing between the cookies to hold them together. Be careful to use enough icing to keep the cookies from coming apart, but not so much that you can't snap them apart for easy eating!
The boxes I used are 3" clear acetate cubes. Be aware that if you use these boxes, the flowers on the top of the cookie stacks need to be fairly flat so that they will fit in the boxes and not risk breakage.
While I was working on the luncheon stacks, I decided to make a few extra and experiment with some different decorations.