When the Rule of Thumb Is 12 Cookies per Guest (2024)

There isn’t a wedding planner in Pittsburgh who doesn’t consider where the cookie table will be placed in the reception space, knowing a well-executed cookie table can take the cake if size, quantity, and display emanate beauty and a bounty of cookies.

More importantly, cookie tables are a straightforward, traditional symbol of love for the couple: the more cookies, the more love.

Guests may ooh and ahh over a masterpiece wedding cake, but in this corner of the country, their hands and hearts are at the cookie table, drooling over an extravagant spread of mostly homemade cookies designed to impress, cause sugar attacks, give rise to guests’ criticism or kudos, and encourage cookie theft into purses and pockets.

We often are talking hundreds and hundreds of cookies at one wedding reception. There are mothers, relatives, and friends who bake relentlessly for months, and fathers who showcase the cookies on things they build — like a miniature Ferris wheel with cookies placed on the seats.

One mother recently posted to a Facebook cookie table group that she had taken her thousandth cookie out of the oven.

At a time when cheesecake, pies, doughnuts, cake pops, and other sweets replace or augment the wedding cake, the cookie table has endured, thrived, and spread to other parts of the country, especially if the bride, or groom, is a Pittsburgh émigré.

One mother recently posted to a Facebook cookie table group that she had taken her thousandth cookie out of the oven.