Last year for Christmas (and I mean Christmas 2008 here) I used a Chapters gift certificate to buy myself the book Cookie Craft. I’ve been wanting to make fabulously decorated sugar cookies ever since. This year, as I have three opening nights in a row leading up to Valentine’s Day, I decided to make use of the set of heart cookie cutters my mum sent me last year, and make some cookies.

I’d also been putting this project off because I wasn’t sure how reliable my old mixer was, and how/if I’d have to change any directions. New mixer put paid to all these fears!

I went with two colours of royal icing, although you can see I didn’t do a very good job of matching the pink piping and flood colours. Then came the fun of packaging!

I used that little box pattern I love so much, and paper from the 10 / $1 bin. I chose two papers so the lids would be different, and I mixed up which was the box and which was the lid a bit too.

Then I found a mostly-coordinating colour of vintage seam binding from my stash to tie little bows to close the boxes and attach the tags. For the tags, I just cut 12 rectangles, then used an edge punch on the bottom of each. I just punched a hole through one side of the box for convenience, and because I didn’t have a lot of the same colour ribbon!

The plastic container in the back has the extras – I only made boxes for stage management and actors, the plastic container went in to the green room for crew and designer types. Anyone who was around, really.

I had a lot of fun making both cookies and boxes, but I have to say that I wouldn’t have managed it if I hadn’t had two days off from work.