Another big night!

Wednesday was my last full day of work before the big day, (today is 1/2 day and then coaching) and sounds like the last dry day as well - right now it's POURING! Because of this I shuffled my plans a bit - I finished painting the base of the archway, but didn't deal with attaching the sides, since I'm scaling back to a more temporary and less weather-resistant model. I'd rather not be stuck parking outside for the rest of the week, so I'm waiting to put the rest together till Friday or even Saturday instead of putting it together and taking up my whole parking spot :)

But I still made a full evening of it!

I mixed, rolled, cut out, and baked FOUR batches of The Queen's Tarts, which are now ready to put together today or tomorrow. They'll get raspberry or apricot fillings. The process actually went really quickly, even with my ancient mixer. I was pretty proud of two things, first - this is all the dough I threw out:



Nice, right? Every last scrap I re-rolled an cut until I was down to just the tiniest part.

Then, after baking, I was pretty thrilled to find I only broke 3 cookies! That doesn't sound that impressive, but these suckers are fragile. I'll probably lose a couple more when I'm filling them, but so far I'm ahead of last time. Here are the casualties:



I wrapped all the baking up just before 9, and assumed I was headed off to bed (yes, I'm old, I usually crash BEFORE the news even). But then I had an inkling to put together a few goodie boxes, and ended up cranking out nearly 1/2 of them!



I love how they look, and boy are they packed with goodies :) I'm so happy everything fit! The box was the perfect size for all the goodies I wanted to include:



I'm not posting my next to-do list because it's 3 pages long + growing :-O Suffice it to say, I will be running around like the proverbial chicken sans head for the next couple of days, and will likely not get to everything. This will annoy me, but you will probably not notice until I decide I just have to tell you - I've been down this road before :)

Anyways, I'm probably going to be short(er) or updates for the next 48 hours or so, but after Halloween I promise lots of photos & tutorials on every aspect of how I "made" my Wicked Wonderland party 2009 :)