Monday, February 22, 2010

Favour Frustrations


Wedding favours are driving me mad. I know they are not expected and not really necessary, but there are a couple reasons I'm still determined to do them:
  1. Weddings are a busy time for a lot of the guests (bridal party, family, etc.). This often means people forget to eat. I want edible favours so the guests have a little treat to tide them over until dinner is served.
  2. I'm also pretty keen on donation favours. I would love to donate to a few of our favourite non-profits and attach little tags to each guests favour to let them know a donation was made on their behalf. The thing is, I feel like this has to be attached to something. This idea also doesn't take into account the edible option and budget won't allow me to do both.
So, I'm struggling. I know I could make a bunch of wedding themed cookies... but that will be tons of work and stress that I was hoping to avoid. And with moving away from my bridesmaids, I'd be all on my own to do the baking and decorating.

I wish I could end this post with a solution, but I'm just plain stuck. I've looked at a million blogs for ideas and it doesn't seem to be helping. We actually got really excited about little bird nests filled with a few mini chocolate eggs. Then we went to the craft store and saw the price on the nests... not happening!

Any suggestions??

4 comments:

qasiaraine said...

Hi! I came across your blog from the comment you left over at Sara's 2000dollar blog and had my curiousity peaked since you live on Vancouver island. I grew up in NW WA and am always curious about people from nearby :)

Anyhow...I have one suggestion for a favour idea. I got married in last summer and for our favours we made these shortbread rosemary cookies. They're super yummy, super easy, and last forever so you can make them in advance (I still have some frome the wedding that are still good!). And they're cheap!

Rosemary is symbolic of remembrance so we made little tags for the bags of cookies that on one side said "Rosemary is for Remembrance" and on the other side said something along the lines of "Help us remember this day...share your pictures" with instructions on uploading pics to our website. You could easily modify that for a charity...if you have someone you're "remembering" with the donation, or just something along the lines of help us remember the animals or the forests or those battling cancer, or insert your charity of choice.

qasiaraine said...

ooh...I even found the recipe I used (I got mine from the magazine itself)
http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/rosemary-butter-cookies

no need to use special sugar at all...I just used regular sugar for all of it. And they absolutely last way way way longer than 3 days (what cookie is bad in 3 days??).

You can find cheap bags to put them in all over the place...I got mine online somewhere. I think total I spent ~$40 on all supplies. And each batch of cookies makes soo many and the recipe is so easy that it doesn't take much time.

Ok...enough blabbering :-p

Good luck with whatever you end up doing!

Anonymous said...

Oh wow! Thank you for sharing! It's good to hear that you were able to get a lot out of one batch and that they last a long time. And it sounds like they're within our budget! I might just do this!

And I'm glad you found my blog too! We're both so lucky to live in a beautiful area. I've done some camping in Washington and loved it!

qasiaraine said...

Unfortunately I don't actually live there anymore...I'm down in LA now...but want to come back!! Hopefully as soon as the husband is out of grad school!

This is what our end product looked like:
http://erinanddavid.smugmug.com/Weddings/erin-and-davids-pics/IMG1380/631430162_vidKa-L.jpg

The bags I found online for ~$10 for...a lot of bags...I think we probably made at least 80 packets of cookies and there were a ton of bags left. We tied them with embroidery thread and printed off the tags ourself. And tied a sprig of rosemary on from the garden.

The recipe says 5 dozen cookies per batch. My mom and a friend made most of them...my mom's were thicker, the friend's thinner...hence the pic showing two more crispy. :) Both versions were good. The friend got (a lot) more than 5 dozen out of a batch, my mom got about 5 dozen or maybe slightly less. So a LOT of cookies!

My mom was skeptical of rosemary in cookies, but everyone absolutely loved them (I tried them out before deciding on them).

Ok...I apparently can't make short comments :-p

Good luck!

oh...I had a dog named Kody when I was growing up :) The doggy adventure camp sounds awesome.