Wedding Blog

Having accepted that we wouldn’t be able to make our edible favors, I started researching possible treats we could purchase.

Traditional chocolate turtles, or turtle-inspired fudge? Both sounded delicious, but would cost more than we were willing to spend. Immediately, I liked the idea of sweets from the shore, though, which would “fit” with our late summer wedding, as well as our charity donation to benefit the coastal-dwelling diamondback terrapins.

Next, I thought of caramel corn. Does a gourmet popcorn flavor exist that blends caramel with chocolate and pecans? Within a few short days, I was practically a gourmet popcorn pro, having Googled my way to a number of companies with favor-worthy products.

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But I couldn’t quite breathe a huge sigh of relief yet, as following all this research, two pesky issues had bubbled to the surface. The first was, again, price. Homemade candy, particularly if it’s studded with expensive nuts, just doesn’t come cheap. And the second problem? Well, I’d naively neglected to acknowledge that *hot* summer weather and chocolate don’t play nicely together. Several of the companies I contacted apologized, and let me know they wouldn’t be able to ship any popcorn drizzled with chocolate until the fall. Some other customer service representatives informed me if I planned on ordering any “turtle” popcorn, it’d have to be shipped overnight and on ice to ensure minimal (if any!) melting — so there’s the price predicament again.

Ready to throw in the towel, I was thisclose to placing an order for two ounce packages that would have cost us $3.75 each. I’d “sampled” the product — later noticing the company charged me $22 to ship the sample packaged in a styrofoam container with dry ice — which really was delicious. And I’d stopped caring about the cost. I just wanted this task completed, and I didn’t want to sacrifice my edible favor pun in the process.

Since I knew I wanted to place the order by phone, I had to wait out the weekend before moving ahead. Our favor conundrum was definitely not in the forefront of my mind when we stopped into the supermarket. Shortly thereafter, though, we walked out with the crisis averted and a new plan for our wedding favors. (The final installment of our favor saga is coming soon, I promise!)