Easy Favor Packaging

I have now made cookies favors for two different events, both baby showers. The first was for my cousin, where I baked up really cute Mickey Mouse sugar cookies, and packaged them to be consistent with the Disney theme that her mom chose for the shower.

The second were the Grover Cookies of my previous post, which were for my friend Allie's baby shower.

Since the process of making these favors was pretty much the same both times, and since it really can be applied to almost any favor that you would like to make, I thought a separate post that just talked about favors and favor packaging might be useful to some people wanting to create tidy-looking favors for an event. The two examples I have listed here are both edible, obviously, but this method of packaging can also be used for non-edible favors, if you like the look.

Rocky Road Candy

Here's a quick and easy holiday candy recipe that can be made entirely in your microwave. It is a great and tasty treat, and especially easy to do with kids!

Rocky road ice cream was invented in 1929 by William Dreyer, who was in the ice cream business with his partner Joseph Edy -- and yes that is today's Edy's ice cream for those of you in the east, and Dreyer's ice cream for those of you in the west -- the ice cream is marketed under 2 names to honor both founders. As the story goes, William Dreyer added walnuts and bits of marshmallow (snipped with his wife's scissors) to chocolate ice cream. Prior to this point in time, the only ice cream flavors available i he US were vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, so Dreyer's new flavor became a hit. Dreyer and Edy decided to call the flavor "Rocky Road" as a nod to the Great Depression, and the flavor took off from there.

Hazelnut Truffles (aka Nutella Balls)

I’ve actually mentioned nut butter balls before, in one of my very first posts, when I was mulling over potential ideas for wedding favors. I briefly described a basic general process for making candy balls from any nut butter (I have seen peanut, almond, cashew and macadamia nut in Wegman’s). Since I made Nutella balls this past weekend for a party, I thought now would be a great time to go back for a recap, especially since I tweaked the recipe a bit for a richer truffle.

Nutella is a kind of gianduia, that is, a chocolate paste containing about 30% hazelnuts. The generic name comes from Gianduja, a marionette featured heavily in the Italian Carnival (the festival season immediately preceding Lent).  Gianduja the puppet (whose name literally means something like ”John the pottering man”) is portrayed as the archetypal provincial Piedmontese character, honest, loyal, with a love of good wine and pretty girls. Typically wearing a tricorne hat and brown coat trimmed in red, Gianduja is the official “King of the Carnival” in Turin, the capital of Piedmont. Gianduja the chocolate was also an invention of Turin, by the chocolate company Caffarel in 1853 (Caffarel, incidentally, still exists and is now a subsidiary of Lindt). In 1946, Pietro Ferrero, also of Piedmont, formulated a solid block of “Pasta Gianduja” for retail, followed closely by a soft “Supercrema” version in 1951. In 1964, Supercrema got a new formulation and name: Nutella; and today there are nearly 200,000 tons of it produced every year!