Okay time for a long awaited Invitations to Dessert post. I know we said it would be a monthly feature, but as you know I got married Memorial Day weekend and that set me back a little on time. But not to worry, Jen from Homemade by Holman and I will be making this a monthly post eventually, just bear with us.
So I’m really excited about this post because it actually features one of the many personal touches from my personal wedding and because a few months back I actually posted a little teaser as to what my dessert bar would look like (when I designed all of the tags) so I wanted to show you the final product, how it went together with the rest of the wedding and fill you in on some of the recipes. So here we go…
(picture on right by Jimmages Photography)
I decided to do a cookbook featuring classic family dessert recipes in conjunction with my dessert bar as my wedding favor to all of my guests. I also got small white boxes from Uline, added a some cute polka dot tissue paper and tied a coordinating ribbon around each and every one. I also put a “thank you” tag on each one that tied in to the tags that I used on my invitation suite. The paper products really tied the look of the whole wedding together! The cookbook was a 3×4 twelve page booklet that I designed and titled Love is Sweet. Inside the front cover, I wrote a thank you to the guests and prompted guests to fill up their box at the dessert bar. The empty boxes were placed at each place setting.
(picture by Amy Barry Photography)
The dessert bar featured Tommy and I’s favorite family recipes from our moms, grandmas and aunts. I designed coordinating labels to go along with clever titles for each dessert. Using several different cookie jars and platters added a nice aesthetic interest to the dessert bar and the cute signs tied everything together. The cookie jars were from Target, and the Anchor 3-tier cupcake stand, and silver chargers were odds and ends that we had and that I painted silver to coordinate.
The dessert bar included:
(pictures by Amy Barry Photography)
While not all of these wonderful people are still here today, we all still remember the recipes. These were desserts that showed up at major family events or were always there when we showed up at grandma’s house. My sister (Jen with Homemade by Holman) and mom made several of the recipes including the Snickerdoodles, the oatmeal raisin cookies and the German Chocolate Cupcake Bites.
(picture on right by Jimmages Photography)
Jen posted all of these recipes before but wanted to tell you about the slight changes that were made to the German Chocolate Cupcake Bites to fit the dessert bar specifically. The same recipe was used but when she made the frosting, she left out the chopped pecans. Instead she frosted the cupcakes and then used pecan halves to top each one. This made for a much more polished look for the cupcakes, really making the presentation much better since the custard frosting can’t be piped like a traditional buttercream. She also baked the cupcakes in plain white liners and then dropped them into decorative blue gingham liners to match the wedding colors, so the chocolate cake wouldn’t show through too much and you wouldn’t notice the pattern.


- Mother of the Groom’s Famous Banana Bread
- Mother of the Bride’s Sweet Snickerdoodles
- Grammie’s Rich 7-layer Bars
- Grandma Mo’s Salty Ranch Pretzels
- Grandma Kress’s Decadent German Chocolate Cupcake Bites
- Mother of the Groom’s Chunky Chocolate Pecan Cookies
- Grandma Tootie’s Awesome Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
- Aunt Sue’s Crunchy Peanut Bars



[…] Continued here: Dessert Bar – My Wedding | Doodle Dog Blog […]