Homemade wedding favours in jars - your ideas please!

Chilli jam! I love it and am now known for my chilli jam ?

I'm buying mini jars for about £12 for 36 and then the ingredients will probably take it to about £20 but I'm only doing it for the men.

If things are tight do you really need favours?

I've sort of got my heart set on doing them. Stupidly. Definitely don't need favours, our guests will be fed like kings lol. But I'd like to. The chilli jam sounds awesome! Could I - pretty please - scavenge the recipe from you?

More cutesy than rustic, but what about little mini origami stars in jars to decorate their homes with? You can make them easily out of newspaper. sort of useless but cute! You can have big starts as well if you have less patience.

/recipes/sweet-chilli-jam

Here you go! It's a brilliant recipe

Truffles are quite easy to make and would be cute in a jar or make some mini heart shaped cookies. You could of course just fill them with pretty pebbles from the beach (if you live near the coast that is!!!).

What about cookie mix with a tag woth instructions with how to make it. so all you d need to put in is flour sugar etc

My OH made an amazing tomato chutney we used as Christmas presents, and I'm thinking of making it for favours too

/recipes/autumn-tomato-chutney

Depending what time of year your wedding is, you can pick you own hedgerow fruit for free. Damsons, sloes, blackberries etc to make jams or jellies. Or, if you know anyone with an apple tree, you can make apple jelly. All you need is a few bags of sugar.

You can often pick up bowls of fruit for £1 at many market stalls, & boxes of slightly deformed fruit from pick-your-own stalls when in season. Unless you were making a tropical fruit jam, I cant see that the cost of fruit would be more than £6, even if making for 50 guests. (unless your jars are enormous!)

Another option is flavoured oils or vinegars, although they are usually best in a bottle, rather than jars, but might still work. (also, you need plastic lids rather than metal for vinegars as the acid in the vinegar corrodes the metal). You can steep rosemary, garlic, chilli, oregano, thyme, sage, black pepper, mixed herbs etc.

Jars can be made into candles, but I'd think the cost of buying the wicks, fragrance & wax would be more than an edible favour.

Bath salts are nice in jars. You need bath salt & essential oils with the option of adding dried rose petals/lavender etc.

Biscuits & gingerbread can be cheap to make & if iced with guests names, can double as a place name.

Hi Kentish Gal,

This is such a lovely idea. I make jams and chutneys in my spare time so am hoping to do something like this as well. What I have found really good (and cost effective) is making pickled onions - it doesn't involve many ingredients, takes no time at all to make, and are very cheap. I will probably do these for all the men in the party. For the women, I will probably make them some jam, but instead of using fresh fruit, which is expensive and may not be in season when you want to make them, I've used the frozen fruit that you buy in packages in the supermarket. These, in my opinion, tastes just as good as fresh fruit, but a whole lot cheaper. They are also quite often on offer for 3-for-2 as well. And there is little prep involved.

Also, I've bought massive bit of fabric and cut them into circles using pinking shears for the lid toppers - much cheaper than buying them ready made! You could do this in ther colours of your wedding to match them in?

Do let us know how you get on...

Ooh, I love this thread, thanks ladies. I'm very taken with my jars, and some raffia tied around and/or fabric covers (to match my hundreds of feet of bunting). I also like the idea of many different things and as I am very anti-seating plan I don't need them as place names, I thought the labels 'Made With Love' I intend to put on could suggest swapping the jar you've ended up with, for one you actually want, which I thought might be a bit fun, especially for tables where folk don't know each other.

Contents so far:

Mini cookies, fudge, fruit jam, chilli jam, tomato chutney, herbs, old fashioned sweeties.

It works well because I was only going to do them for the adults but with sweets and cookies I can do a jar per person, and they're all different sizes and shape jars, and they'll put out randomly by the lady who's setting up my tables.

I am sort of against giving people something they can keep in their house because everyone's tastes are so different, but if the jar is nicely decorated they can re-use it if they want or recycle it when they've had the contents.

You could do oils, like chilli oil or rosemary and garlic. They last for ages, look good and the rosemary and garlic will be fab with roasties! Ingredients for it would be cheap aswell, I luckily live in a quite a diverse neighbourhood, there are lots of indian and polish food shops which are great for things like dried chillis and chilli seeds and herbs, they are DIRT cheap and pretty good as well. They are so easy, just sterilise the jar, wang in the oil and as many sprigs, peeled cloves and things as you want!

Amy xx