Engayged: The Marriage Party Proposals (+ Chai Spice Eggnog Cookies)
Planning a wedding is a hard thing to do when you’re not really good at planning things. There’s a lot of little details that you have to pay attention to, and keeping track of them all is more work than I imagined! Every day we get a little bit closer to making our dream day a reality, which is a really rewarding feeling.
One of the first steps to planning a wedding is getting your party together. For most couples, this is fairly simple. The bride gets together her best girlfriends, the groom grabs his best buddies, and the biggest decision is making sure that both sides are even. For us, we had to decide on how to make sure that we didn’t end up with a party of all groomsmen. After all, we didn’t want to leave some of our best friends out of the festivities just because of some outdated expectations of gender roles! So for our wedding, we decided to each get a best man and maid of honor, and then have a groomsman and two groomsmaids. That gives us a party of 12 (including ourselves), which is actually a pretty average size for a wedding party.
So after you figure out who to put in your party, you’ve got to ask them. We live in the era of Pinterest, which means you’ve gotta make everything cute. If it ain’t Instagrammable, it ain’t worth it, especially when it comes to weddings! Weddings are like the holy grail of Pinterest. I actually think that Pinterest exists just to plan things like weddings, including wedding party proposals. But as cute as all the ideas on Pinterest were, I really wanted to make all of mine individual for each of the recipients. The first one I wanted to do was obviously my maid of honor, because that’s the most important person in the whole party. The maid of honor is there to help the bride (or groom) with preparations for the big day, and to make sure everything goes off without a hitch. Who better for the job than Ana, one of my closest friends who also happens to work for a wedding planner in her spare time!
Ana and I go back a long way, and we’ve just gotten closer since we started college together. We’ve had a lot of good times, and a lot of memories I have of Ana involve us studying at Starbucks freshman year. I’ve never really been a fan of coffee, so I always used to get chai lattes while we stayed up late cramming for exams and memorizing vocabulary. We also love baking together (see our recipe for Autumn Apple Bundt Cake), so I wanted to combine those two memories into one personalized maid of honor gift.
That’s where this recipe comes in. I found it while looking for the perfect thing that I could bake for Ana, and I knew it was the one. These cookies have the perfect amount of sweetness while still having a lot of the spice and flavor of the chai. They’re perfect for anyone that doesn’t like things too sweet, and who may be allergic to common dessert ingredients like chocolate or nuts. They’d go great with a cup of hot spiced tea on a cold winter’s day, so try it out in the months of icy mess that are to come!
Chai Spice Eggnog Cookies
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter (melted)
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 1 packet chai tea
- 1 egg
- 2 Tbsp eggnog
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 Tbsp vanilla
- 2 cups flour
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1/4 tsp cinnamon
Instructions
- In a large mixing bowl, stir together the melted butter and sugar. Cut open the tea bag and add the tea, then mix in the egg, eggnog, salt, and vanilla.
- In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Add the dry ingredients to the wet a bit at a time, stirring until just combined. Wrap the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for 2-3 hours, or the freezer for 1 hour.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Scoop tablespoons of the dough out and roll them into balls, placing them equal distance apart on a cookie sheet. Bake 15-17 minutes, until the tops crackle and the edges brown. Cool on a wire rack, then enjoy!
Notes
- This recipe was found in the Barnes & Noble Cookie Bake-off cookbook, which you can find in Barnes & Noble stores or online here.
- The original recipe added 1 Tbsp of dark rum with the wet ingredients. I'm broke and don't drink rum, so I didn't feel like buying a bottle just for the recipe and it turned out just fine without it! Adding the rum would just bring out more of the spice flavor, so feel free to try it if you have some on hand!