A Seersucker Wedding and Bowtie Sugar Cookies

This weekend, we went to the beautiful, Southern-style wedding of one of my husband’s closest friends, who’s basically one of those truly good guys that you’re grateful your husband is friends with and never mind your husband hanging out with (in fact, I wish we all lived closer to each other).  My husband and I are lucky in that we both really like each other’s friends – this makes that whole being married and going to events together thing significantly easier.

The groom is a big bowtie fan, and I’d actually meant to make him bowtie cookies for his birthday last fall, but work got away from me, so I figured that I’d make up for it by sending my husband down to the bachelor party with a box full of bowtie cookies.  There’s something extra fun to me about finding a cookie cutter that suits a person’s personality – probably because one year, I think for Christmas, my mom got us all cookie cutters that matched our personality.  Mine was a foot, because I *hate* shoes and walk around barefoot as much as possible when home.

These were very fun to decorate, after I figured out how to make the frosting for some of the cookies turn navy, anyway.  I took art for four years in high school, you’d think I’d know how to make different colors, but sometimes I get lawyer-brain and forget things.

One thing I realized early on in the baking process was that bowties are fragile.  Well, bowtie cookies are fragile, all because of that narrow point in the middle.  In order to curb the cookie breakage I was experiencing, I started rolling the cookies much thicker than I usually roll cookies.  That mostly solved the problem.

I made some of the bowtie cookies seersucker because the groom and all of the groomsmen were wearing seersuckers.  (I love how my husband looks in a seersucker suit, so I was excited when I found this out.)

Bowtie Cookies

• 1 recipe Em’s (well, Em’s Mom’s) sugar cookie cough
• 1 recipe Em’s royal icing
• toothpicks and such

Preheat oven to 375.  Roll out half the cookie dough, leaving the rest in the oven.  Aim for the dough to be about 1/4 inch thick.  Cut yourself some bowties and place them on a parchment-lined baking sheet.  Bake for 7-9 minutes, and don’t let them get brown.  Cool completely while you bake the rest of the cookies and roll out, cut, and cook the second half of the dough.

Make royal icing per Em’s instructions.  Remove half of the icing and cover with plastic wrap.  Dye the rest of the icing whatever other color you want.  I died the other half of the icing dark blue, removed some of the dark blue and mixed it with some of the white in a third bowl to make light blue, and then added violet to the dark blue to make navy (finally, after giving up on coming up with the combo myself and asking my husband to Google it for me).

Before adding extra water and making flood icing, outline your cookies.  I outlined the little inner circle, too, so that I could make that a different design from the two little . . . tie parts?  What do you call those?  Unclear.

Army of Bowties!  Coming to a theater near you!

Now add more water to your icing to make flood icing, because here’s where the fun begins.   You can really do anything you want, because bowtie cookies do not need to look like actual bowties.

I made the seersucker bowties by flooding the cookies with white icing, and then dipping a toothpick in the lighter blue icing I’d made and dragging it in lines across the flooded cookies.  I thought about making straighter lines with a pastry bag, but then I thought about the fact that seersuckers are usually seen on people, so they don’t look perfectly straight.

These I flooded with the navy icing, and then I tried lots of methods to make polka dots.  Sometime I used a pastry bag (big dots), sometimes I used a toothpick (little dots), and sometimes I accidentally dropped icing on them while reaching for the next cookie (funny shapes).

For these, I flooded with white, splashed some blue by getting a lot on a toothpick at once and flinging it onto the cookie, and then swirled my toothpick around until I was satisfied with the design.

Is there anyone in your life who was secretly born in 1860 but just hid out, Rip van Winkle style, until the modern day?  Aka, anyone in your life who wears bowties a lot?  Make some of these!   They’re fun and tasty.