Picking the perfect wedding favors was something that was a little difficult for me and Sam. Two years ago, we went to Thomas and Jocelyne’s gorgeous wedding in Baltimore (I am still dying over how gorgeous their flowers were!!) and their wedding favors were their favorite books, ranging from childhood favorites like The Phantom Tollbooth to their favorite cookbooks. Thomas and Jocelyne are both huge lovers of books, so this was pretty much the perfect choice for them. In fact, one of Thomas’ favorite Christmas presents to date was a bookshelf from Jocelyne filled with all the Pulitzer prize winning books for the last ten years.

After their wedding, Sam and I started talking about how cool it would be to give board games away as favors. As you may know, we are both avid board game players, and a lot of our friends are as well. We even came up with a list of our favorite games and started writing short descriptions of each game, rating each one from 1 to 5. We were thinking of putting signs on them to say “Best Game for 2 Players”, “Best Game while Waiting for a Flight”, “Best Cooperative Game”, etc. Whenever games went on sale, I would look at Sam and ask if we could stock up on them, haha! Good thing he told me no, because we didn’t end up giving out board games as favors ;). By the way, if you’re wondering, Terraforming Mars and Pandemic Legacy Season 1 are our favorite games!

When we chose to have a smaller wedding with only our immediate family and a few of our closest friends, we realized it no longer made sense to gift board games. Although many of our friends did love board games, there would be a lot of our family members who wouldn’t use them. (Though now that I am thinking about it, maybe we should have just gifted them Mahjong, haha!) I think it was when we were in New Zealand (literally the week after we decided we were going to have our commitment ceremony) that we started throwing around the idea of a cookbook. Many of our guests love cooking as well, so it seemed like it would be the perfect wedding favor. Originally, we were going to do recipes inspired by our favorite dishes while traveling. In the end, we went for our favorite, tried and true recipes, ranging from my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe to Sam’s mom’s ribs recipe.

We actually ended up putting the cookbooks together in about two weeks when we realized my favorite album company was having a sale. It was a crazy two weeks in which we cooked many many dishes and photographed them all (usually after the sun had set!), formatted all the recipes in Photoshop, put together the spreads, and sent them off to be made. I LOVE our cookbook and we use it all the time. It’s so much more convenient than pulling recipes up on our phones, haha. We are already planning on putting together a second one with recipes that didn’t make the cut the first time 😉

Hopefully this will help you with picking the perfect wedding favors to fit both your personalities and your guests! A few other wedding favors I have see have been: plum jam made from the bride’s mom’s plum trees, handmade paper flowers, candles, macarons, and more.