Baby Shower Cookies

A friend's cousin is having a baby shower on the 16th of January, and I offered to make the shower cake, as well as cookies for favors.  I borrowed some cookie cutters from Janet (my cake partner in crime, lol) that were baby-related.  I brought home three cookie cutters: big teddy bear, small teddy bear and a ducky.  I decided to use the smaller bear and the ducky, and package two cookies together for each favor.  They are expecting about 44 people, so I ended up making 55 cookies of each shape.

The recipe I use for the sugar cookies can be found on Cake Central, the recipe is the No Fail Sugar Cookies.  They are awesome!  I decided to try something a little different this time, and substituted lemon extract for some of the vanilla extract.  Not enough to alter the taste of the cookie, but just enough to make people go 'hmmm, what's that taste, it's really good!' 

Ever wonder what 110 cookies look like????

I ended up using 1.5 batches of the cookie dough for the 110 cookies that I made.  After baking the cookies (which took all afternoon), I decided to go ahead and make the icing, so I can just start decorating them tomorrow.  Why so early, if the shower isn't until next weekend?  Well....it takes anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for the icing to dry enough to bag them.  There are some designs I plan on piping over the initial flood of the cookies. 

The icing recipe is one that I found somewhere online, and have used before.  It can be found here.  It is different from regular royal icing, in that it still dries hard, but it dries shiny.  I, personally, think it tastes a heck of a lot better too!  I added some lemon extract to the icing to compliment the cookies.