Nikki’s Butterfly Garden Wedding Sugar Cookie Favors

For my vintage butterfly garden wedding, I wanted all the details to be perfect and for guests to really feel the elegance in every part of the experience.  Some DIYs I did were simpler than others—like the ribbon wands that guests waved to celebrate our “I dos,” the wish tags shaped like butterflies, and luggage tags that hung on our wish tree. But one of my favorite details that I put a good amount of time into were my homemade sugar cookie favors.

I worked on these little gifts all year long by first determining a taste test for how long could a sugar cookie be frozen. If you want to make cookie favors in advance, do not freeze them longer than one month. I chose a two-week freezing time period to make sure they still tasted fresh. If you freeze cookies for too long, they lose a lot of their flavor.

I picked foldable plastic box containers I purchased from eFavorMart.com, essentially scoring the 4x4x2-inch boxes for 30 cents apiece. What’s great about eFavorMart is they have boxes of every size, shape, and color for great prices. I chose clear so I could show off the cookie itself, but solid colors are also available.

Once Easter hit, I waited until all the Easter basket grass went on sale and scored bags of lavender grass for 79 cents apiece, and each bag could fill about 20-25 boxes.

The handwritten “thank you” tags were cut with die cutter from Michael’s Craft Store. Simply pick a ribbon to match and you’ve got yourself a beautifully decorated box full of elegance your guests will definitely appreciate.

My sugar cookies were made to look like butterflies.

It’s important when making sugar cookie favors to pick a sugar cookie recipe you are comfortable with. Roll out the dough thicker than you would normally, between ¼ and ½ inches thick.  Bake at 350 degrees, and keep an eye on it regardless of what your recipe says for the time. Start checking after 5 minutes in the oven and remove once they hit a lightly golden hue. The less baked a cookie is, the more moist it’ll be on the inside. Just make sure the outside has a nice color so it crisps up once it cools.

The trick to making bulk cookie favors in advance is to use royal icing or glazes instead of normal frosting or icing, because anything else will easily smash and will not achieve the look you’re going for. However, glazes are not ideal for elaborate designs. Choose something simple and achieve a great look for your wedding.

The recipe I used for the glaze was:

• 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
• 1 tablespoons light corn syrup
• 2 tablespoons of water
• Desired food coloring drops

For 120 cookies, I made four batches of this recipe, but not all at once. Make the glaze in small doses so it doesn’t harden while you work with it. I dipped the whole cookie in the first color of the glaze to get the base coat. Then I filled a plastic Ziplock baggie with the purple glaze, cut a slit at the bottom, and quickly drew lines down the middle of each cookie. Sugar pearls dotted the wings. The glaze adds a sweet sugary coating that isn’t too much for the cookie, but just enough to give it an added kick of flavor.

Because my wedding was a destination wedding, I kept my cookies frozen until about three days before my wedding and let them defrost during travel to minimize the risk of breaking. If you’re working from home, defrost your cookies two days in advance so you have time to stuff your boxes.

Sugar cookie favors are really great for weddings because you can seriously create any type of look you desire from monograms to other theme-oriented shapes. Just get creative. It’ll take time to assemble, but it’s well worth it—especially for how little it costs to do.  It costs about $20 for all the baking supplies for 100 cookies and if you get wholesale ribbon and boxes like I did, the cost per box and ribbon are literally pennies.  Considering most pre-assembled favors are $1-3, I think this is a great deal and looks amazing.

Estimated cost: $0.75 per cookie

Author: Nikki Roberti Miller
Photos by Christi Falls Photography

Nikki Roberti Miller is a DIY Bride contributer who loves writing how-to’s and budget saving tips any bride can enjoy. Passionate about all things wedding, crafts and cooking, she can be most often found flipping through magazines or experimenting in her kitchen, knee deep in flour. She also blogs about her newlywed adventures and kitchen excursions in her blog at www.MrsHealthyEverAfter.com.