Double stacked of cuteness...

I made my very first Iced Shortbread cookie for little Emma's 6th birthday party.
They wanted something different as party favours and asked if I could come up with something like the iced sugar cookies.
This project started my new hobby of hunting down and collecting cookie cutters, Yay! for me, but not so much for my little house that is already jammed packed with full of 'stuff' :OP
I'd love to try making my own too, if only I knew how to, but that will have to be added onto my long list of 'things to try'.
My cookie cutter hunt lead me to the idea of a double layer cookie, and I found a fab set of cutters to do just that. It was a set of one large 5" flower for the base and little individual petals and a bumble bee for the top layer. All in all, it was a total of 9 cookies in one. Quite the assembly job it was, but well worth the end result.

Anyway..... I don't know about you, but a sugar cookie tastes like sugared cardboard to me, more like a biscuit, and I'm not a big fan of biscuits.
I love cookies! So I could not make myself bake any biscuit-like sugar cookies. I just couldn't do it! I need to love what I make so I had to find a recipe that I loved to suit this very purpose. After spending a week of trying out recipes of different sugar cookies, I just dropped the whole idea of it and started from scratch.

What did I love? Well, I do love the melt in your mouth Shortbread cookie, so that was what I started with. I had to adjust my Shortbread recipe to make it suitable for cutting and icing, and still kept all the elements of a delicious buttery rich melt in your mouth Shortbread cookie.

A week and 8 attempts later, I got a recipe that I was truly happy with. It held its shape well, was buttery, with a hint of lemon n vanilla, wasn't dry, and tasted perfect! By this time however, everyone who lived near me was over loaded with shortbread cookies :OP

The assembly line for this cookie was long.... and although it was only an order for 15 cookies, it took forever! Let me put it this way, I had to individually cut, bake, ice and stack each of the 15 big flowers + 15 bumble bees + 105 petals = a lot of cookies!
After a lot more practice, thank God I work a lot faster these days, because those cookies took what felt like an eternity.
But it was FUN! Loved every second of it and I especially loved the Bumble Bees! I even made some extra bumble bees for the fun of it because they were just too cute :O)

So here's my Lemon Vanilla Shortbread Iced cookies