Wedding Favors
Guests at a wonderful wedding, having enjoyed fine cuisine, top entertainment, top vintages of wine and champagne, and the joyful company of friends and family for your happy occasion would say the experience itself was all the gift they need, but it’s a top wedding etiquette idea to offer a take-home wedding favor they’ll love.
In years past, brides and grooms gave our small wine bottles with their personalized labels on them, and now the top wedding trend for weddings in our Northern New Jersey area is edibles…particularly something sweet.
Here are the top trends edible favors, welcome at the end of your wedding reception: Read more…
Wedding Favors
Among the most popular wedding ideas, a category that many of our New Jersey wedding planners say is an important reception décor element is a beautiful presentation of the wedding favors. With today’s favor trends including edibles such as chocolate truffles, cake pops, and especially New Jersey shore salt water taffy, and with non-edible favors including wine bottle stoppers and other pretty-yet-inexpensive useful take-home gifts, our New Jersey and New York City wedding couples are designing creative, enticing wedding favor displays to complement their reception venue’s décor plan.
Now, there’s a real sense of importance in how the wedding favors will be displayed, so we suggest the following top wedding trends for favor presentation:
Setting Up a Favor Table
- A favor table creates an artistic opportunity for your display, with a top wedding trend of using a gorgeous tablecloth on the wedding favor table. Wedding planners now suggest favor table linens that coordinate with guest table linens for a uniform look, but may be a few shades lighter or darker than the wedding reception hall guest table linens. The tablecloth may be shimmery, embroidered, pearl-dotted or other wedding décor style-matching design, setting a lovely foundation on which the favors will be displayed. Read more…
Your wedding favors make the stylish ‘last impression’ on your wedding guests, so be sure to choose lovely favors, and create a wedding favor display that’s pleasing to the eye as well. When you take time to creatively display even the most modest of favors, your efforts create an effect that makes it seem like the favors are more expensive, more upscale and more of a treat. At our New Jersey wedding venue, we’ve seen some of the loveliest wedding favor display trends:
- Place one wedding favor at each guests’ place setting, in front of their plates.
- Create a wedding favors table by your gifts table, and set on it large, elegant silver platters that hold organized, even rows of your packaged favors. We use the same presentation style for our petit fours and other small desserts, so your favor treats will share the same elegant styling.
- Accent your wedding favors table with a floral centerpiece matching those on the guest tables, or place an 8”x10” framed photo of the two of you, paired with a framed, printed thank –you note from the two of you, in the center of the table, surrounded by your favors.
- Arrange your wedding favors on three-tier serving pedestals, just like our banquet managers and pastry chefs use with our dessert offerings, for an elegant look that matches the serving-style the guests have admired all throughout your reception and dessert hour.
- You can also use these three-tier serving pedestals as favor presentations that our servers can bring to each of your guest tables, creating an upscale presentation at the end of your reception.
- Our servers can also present each table’s favors on an elevated serving platter or on a small silver platter, with the platter garnished with additional chocolates, mints, or – a favorite at our New Jersey weddings – pastel-colored Jordan almonds.
- If you’ll make a donation to charity in lieu of traditional favors, display a framed printed announcement of your charity choice, and place next to it a basket of packaged cookies, chocolates or mints for guests to enjoy as they depart.
- Arrange one of the hottest current favor presentations – the favor bar. At this long table, guests use tongs or scoops to select their own choices of chocolates, truffles, brownie bites, colorful candies or other favor choices from glass bowls and platters. They package their own edible favor choices in either clear Lucite boxes or cellophane bags that they can tie with a ribbon. You can serve just truffles, or you can mix up your favor bar offerings to include bite-sized brownies, fudge squares, petit fours and an array of dessert indulgences.
Edible favors are the top choice at our Southern New Jersey wedding venue, but we’re also seeing single long-stemmed roses packaged in cellophane and ribbon, displayed in a tall, beautiful vase, ready for guests to choose their own take-home wedding flower.
All the best,
Caitlyn Bradley, Director of Private Dining, Ram’s Head Inn
A great many of our New Jersey wedding couples have gone back to the tradition of offering wonderful wedding favors for their guests to take home as they leave our wedding reception venue. (In the past few years, some couples chose to skip the favors as a way to save money, but thoughtful take-home favors are now back on the Must list!) What the couples choose to give as wedding favors has evolved from those tiny photo frames and wine glasses embossed with the bride and groom’s name to a new trend that makes guests much happier – edible gourmet treats.
Your wedding reception lasts several hours, and the wedding cake and desserts may have been served an hour or two before the close of your celebration. So when guests find that their wedding favors are delicious frosted brownies or theme-decorated cupcakes, they very often treat themselves to these treats before they even leave your reception! That’s the mark of a great edible wedding favor. Guests can’t wait to enjoy them.
Here are some of the most popular edible wedding favors that we’ve seen, and made, for our New Jersey wedding couple’s take-home treats:
•Frosted brownies
Frosted cookies, in heart-shapes or cut into wedding theme shapes like a bride’s dress or a wedding dove
• Chocolate-chip cookies
• White macadamia nut cookies
• Gourmet truffles
• Theme-shape chocolates, such as hearts or butterflies
• Pastel sugar-covered Jordan almonds (a traditional, symbolic favorite of our New Jersey wedding couples!)
• Gourmet flavored wedding cupcakes
• Hazelnut cream-filled cookies
• Personalized candies, such as M&Ms sporting the initials or names of the bride and groom
• Wedding color-matched jelly beans
• Chocolate bark
• Fudge squares in a variety of flavors
• Seasonal-matched wedding favor treats, such as maple brownies for a fall wedding
• Baggies of gourmet-flavored popcorn or kettlecorn, the couple’s favorite snack
• And more…
Presentation is key for wedding favors, so package each edible treat in its own ribbon-tied box or cellophane baggie, and affix a thank-you message label right to the package, expressing your gratitude that guests came to share your day with you.
All the best,
Caitlyn Bradley, Director of Private Dining, Ram’s Head Inn
