Wedding DIY: BBQ Sauce Favors!

For our wedding favors, we wanted to do something fun, something 'us', and something guests wouldn't throw away the next day {i.e. food}. So we immediately thought of doing a canned BBQ sauce after I saw a similar concept on Pinterest.

Our final product - Sweet & Tangy Version

So we set off on an adventure to find the perfect barbeque sauce and discovered that we actually wanted to make 2 sauces- the Bride's sauce {sweet & tangy} and the Groom's sauce {mustard based}.

We found this great recipe for a 14 spice dry rub along with the sweet and tangy BBQ sauce over on The Yummy Life. Greg's a fan of the mustard based sauces, so he found this one on Just a Pinch. We made a small test batch, and they were both perfect!

We must of our ingredients from Costco since you could buy in bulk, and then got the spices fresh from the Farmer's Market. We didn't take many pictures during the cooking process, well, because it was really really messy, and cooking that much of anything isn't pretty!

After a full day of cooking and canning, we got them all laid out on the dining room table, and then waited for the cans to cool so we could see if they were all successfully canned. I think it was 2 that failed, so we put those two them in the fridge for us to enjoy. But hey, 2 out of 140 isn't bad in my opinion.

We did all of this in June 2013, because we knew the canned BBQ sauce would last for at least a year, so that would give our guests plenty of time to use it, and we didn't want to wait to long and stress ourselves out at the last minute. Though we did wait until September to put together the spice packets that we attached to the BBQ, since we knew that would harden much quicker.

If you are familiar with canning, you know that the ring on top is really only important during the canning process and you can actually take that off once the jar is successfully canned. So once I was ready to package the BBQ's to give out, I cut out square of fabric to put under the ring for a cute look and tied everything together with a small business card with the name of the sauce and some twine. Just to be extra fancy, the tags match the wedding invitations!




I also made this little chalkboard sign to go with the favors, but I'm guessing the wedding coordinator decided not to put it out, since it's missing from all of the pictures. But oh well.... it all still looked great!