Personalized Cookies on a Budget

Regular readers will recall that I had a senior in high school this year and 12 years of hard work paid off with her graduation this past weekend. Her reception is next weekend however, so this week I'll be busy trying to pull together the last of the plans to hold a frugal open house style party... but no one needs to know how much I didn't spend!

I've documented many of the steps thus far in previous posts (I ordered the personalized M&M's from the link in my sidebar to the right, posted about the table top decorations from the Dollar Store and the frugal gifts we made for 30 of her friends whose parties she was visiting) but yesterday I finished yet another fun and frugal idea; personalized cookies!

Pricing pre-made cookies on the internet and at local bakeries I saw the cookies upwards of $2-$3 per cookie. Even the cheapest would run $20-30 for 12. Not in my budget! Besides, I've always been one to do everything myself... this was no different.

Looking over the edible images at my local bakeries I liked the idea but didn't like the price. For about $25 a sheet I could get 20- 2" circle images to use on cupcakes, etc. But with about 200 cookies needed that was insanity. Spending a couple hundred dollars on frosting images for cookies is no budget friendly! So I went online and after searching through numerous companies I found one that offered a very affordable sheet of 20 images, uncut for about $6 per sheet. (To have the circles cut out for you will run about $17-40 per sheet). I ordered numerous sheets with 4 different images and they arrived that week. I kept them stored in the plastic until I needed them. On Friday I cleaned a pair of scissors with anti-bacterial soap, dried them well and set to work cutting out 140 circle images.

I had yesterday 'off' of work for Memorial Day so I used the free day to whip up a batch of cookie dough (ok, 4 batches!) and cut out 2 inch circles.




Cooling cookies before adding the images.

Glazed and attaching the images while the glaze is still wet.

Cost of Dough: Minimal
Cost of images: $50
Savings: Literally hundreds of dollars



Cookie Dough and Glaze recipes available on my recipe site: www.housewifebarbie.com