Weddingbee Blog

Favors were, for a good portion of this engagement, the bane of my existence. I cannot tell you how many times I changed my mind one what to do for favors, and it has caused so me much stress over the last 16 months.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Favors aren’t even necessary. Why are you even worrying about it? Silly Cardigan. But here’s the problem: Early on in our engagement I had succumbed to what I like to call the “OMG-it’s-on-sale-and-I-have-to-have-it-NOW” Syndrome when I saw some really cute favor boxes on clearance at Michaels. I went on some sort of crazy favor-box-stalking hunt and visited a million (or maybe like, three) different stores trying to find enough. And then I made Mr. Cardigan help me make them cuter by running the lids through my Cuttlebug to emboss them.

So, as you see…we had favor boxes. And we were going to fill them, dammit.

I have had about a million and one ideas of what to fill them with over the course of our (long) engagement, but they all ended up not working for one reason or the other.

I really wish I had some cool story to tell you about how we finally decided on what favors to choose, but I don’t. Basically, I got fed up with all the other options and declared that we were giving our guests hot chocolate mix and that was that. The end. Game over.

SO! I made hot chocolate mix a couple of weeks ago! I’m shocked at how easy and cheap it was…with all of the ingredients, including the bags to put it in (which I’ll then put in the boxes, which is totally redundant but I don’t care) and the marshmallows for topping, it ended up totaling a little less than $50, or less than 50 cents per guest. Score!

I used this recipe because I have a crush on Alton Brown and I worship pretty much anything he makes.

Here’s the cast of characters:

(I returned the second box of powdered milk because I bought way too much)

You can check the recipe for details, but basically you throw all that stuff in a bowl, mix it together, and call it a day. Easy peasy!

I estimated that we’d give each guest about a third of a cup of mix, and went to town. I think I made about 6 batches of the Alton recipe, and pretty soon I had two GIANT bags of hot chocolate mix!

…oh, and I also had a really big mess.

Hey, I didn’t say this was a neat project.

I can’t say that I’m happy with how it turned out yet because I haven’t tried it—it’s been 80 freaking degrees around here lately. Before I package it all up I’ll make myself a cup, though, just to make sure it doesn’t suck.

It’s officially all finished now and packaged in our cute little favor boxes, BUT, it’s officially wedding week so things are a little bit crazy around here, so I don’t really have time to share. You’ll have to wait for my recaps to see how they turned out!

Did you have a hard time choosing favors?