Traditionally, bridal showers were occasions during which a bride-to-be’s female friends and relatives provided her with small gifts that she could use to set up her new household. This basic idea remains intact, but today’s bridal showers span across many different themes.
If you’re in charge of planning a bridal shower, you’d probably like it to be special, practical and fun!
A recipe or kitchen themed bridal shower fills the bill nicely. This type of shower is special because guests share their favorite recipes with the bride-to-be.
It’s practical because it gives a bride-to-be a stockpile of unique recipes, and it’s fun because everyone can contribute in her own special way.
Learn more about planning a recipe themed bridal shower below.
Reasons to Throw a Recipe Themed Bridal Shower
There are plenty of great reasons to throw a recipe or kitchen themed bridal shower. A few examples include:
They serve a purpose
When couples are young and newly married, they are often at a loss about what to prepare when dinnertime rolls around.
A bride-to-be will emerge from a recipe themed bridal shower with a bevy of excellent ideas.
Each guest will contribute a recipe with specific instructions and ingredients, which eliminates a lot of the guesswork.
In turn, this should help a couple’s first months together unfold more smoothly.
Everyone learns something
Although the recipes are intended for the bride-to-be, they can be passed around and shared with other guests as well.
Everyone loves discovering delicious new recipes, and an event like this is a perfect opportunity to do so.
Tying it altogether is easy
These days, it’s easy to find personalized bridal shower supplies.
Each guest contributes her own recipe on a recipe card, and those cards are compiled in a recipe binder or box.
The cards are sent along with the invitations, and everything can feature the same theme.
Getting Started – First Steps in Planning a Recipe Themed Bridal Shower
One of the first things to do is to choose coordinating invitations, announcements and recipe cards. It can be fun to select a recipe binder or recipe box that features the same basic design and color scheme as the invitations.
Personalized recipe cards, announcements and invitations are a lot of fun, and you can even find personalized recipe binders as well.
The bride-to-be will cherish these items as mementos, and you will have a blast browsing through the many stylish options that are available these days.
Custom recipe binders can be put together like scrapbooks and feature photos of the happy couple, words of wisdom, and the recipes collected from the shower guests.
My store has a variety of coordinating personalized invitations, recipe cards, and binders available for purchase on Zazzle. You may also want to consider adding coordinated personalized envelope seals and/or address labels to your invitation set. I’ve included examples of some of our recipe themed bridal shower invitation sets throughout this post.
Preparing the Invitations For Your Recipe Themed Bridal Shower
To ensure that as many guests can attend the bridal shower as possible, try to mail out the invitations or announcements early. Include a recipe card with each invitation. Instruct each guest to fill out her favorite recipe on her card.
Some Ideas for Wording Your Recipe Themed Bridal Shower Invitations
If you are including recipe card inserts with your invitations, you’ll want to provide some instructions; on the recipe card itself or on the invitation.
An alternative is not to provide the inserts, but instead to just ask guests to bring their favorite recipe to the shower with them. In this case, you might want to ask for a particular paper size. 8.5″x11″ paper is a good bet so that it fits easily in binders.
Here are some wording ideas for you to consider. You can get creative and make up your own recipe themed bridal shower invitation verse as well.
The perfect ingredients for a successful marriage:
lots of love, a pinch of spice and no shortage of answers to “What’s for dinner?”
Please join us for a Bridal Shower in honor of
Ashley Black
on August 12th at 11 am
at the home of Amanda Green
1234 Some Street
Please bring your favorite recipe on 8.5″x11″ paper.
Regrets only to Amanda 555-4567
Ashley’s joy is getting to cook
So please give her a recipe from your book.
Breakfast, lunch or dinner for two
appetizer, dessert, or fondue
When she cooks it she will think of you!
Please join us for a Bridal Shower in honor of
Ashley Black
on August 12th at 11 am
at the home of Amanda Green
1234 Some Street
Please fill out the enclosed recipe card with your favorite recipe
and bring it with you to the shower.
You may also bring, if you like, a
gift to help set up their kitchen.
RSVP by August 6th to Amanda
at 111-222-3333
Additional ideas for collecting recipes
These days, many family recipes are posted online. In addition to having each guest fill out a customized recipe card, you could ask each person to include a URL for the recipe as well if there is a URL available.
The bride-to-be will be able to access her favorite recipes from her computer as well, and she can even bookmark them so that they are always available.
Your guests can email you the links prior to the shower and you can collect them in a list to provide the bride. You could also print the recipes off and add them to the recipe binder you are creating.
Special instructions for large groups
If your bridal shower guest list is exceptionally large, you could divvy up the recipe cards into different categories.
Send requests for main dish recipes to one group of women, and send requests for dessert recipes to another.
You can also break them into categories like side dishes, soups and salads and beverages.
When you put the recipe binder together, you can sort it into different categories.
The bride-to-be will be thrilled by the huge assortment of recipes that she receives, and she’ll appreciate the fact that she can create entire meals from ideas in her binder.
Potluck for a Recipe Themed Bridal Shower
Depending on your particular circ*mstances, you might want to have each guest bring along a physical sample of the recipe that she is contributing!
Everyone will be able to sample the recipes that will go into the recipe binder, and the bride-to-be will have first-hand examples of how each recipe should taste.
This will also give her the opportunity to ask questions if she has any as well. It will also help the guests decide which recipes they might want to collect themselves.
Most importantly, it’s a whole lot of fun, and it is an easy, built-in way to provide food and refreshments for everyone and drum up conversations.
Have a lot of paper and pens around so that people can share their recipes.
Fun Activities for a Recipe Themed Bridal Shower
In addition to the regular bridal shower games that you can find out on the internet, you might find the following activities of interest for this particular theme.
Recipe For a Successful Marriage – Tips and Tricks for the Bride-to-Be
Hand out “recipe for a successful marriage” index cards and have everyone jot down at least one or two special tips and tricks for a successful marriage.
People always have words of wisdom they can provide the bride-to-be and these will become mementos that she can peruse for years to come.
Or, have everyone jot down at least one or two special tips and tricks for the kitchen. Everyone has special little things that they do to keep their kitchens tidy or to produce the best results in the kitchen possible, and an event like this is the perfect opportunity to compile everyone’s best advice.
The bride-to-be is sure to refer to these cards again and again as she sets up her own kitchen, and she’ll remember each person who contributed each suggestion.
Meal Plan Calendars
If she’s never prepared meals at home regularly before, the bride-to-be is sure to appreciate all of the advice that she can get. At the bridal shower, have a customized calendar available.
Perhaps even a dry-erase version or a tear away notepad version. Using ideas from the collected recipe cards, as well as their imagination, encourage guests to fill it in with their favorite daily menus.
Whether a guest fills in one menu or several, the goal should be to fill in as much of the calendar as possible. Later, when the new bride is drumming up ideas for meals to prepare over the upcoming week, she can just flip open her calendar and take her pick from many excellent ideas.
Name that Spice or Herb Game
Put spices or cut up fresh herbs in numbered containers. Then have guests try and identify the spice using whatever means possible. A kitchen themed prize can be provided to the winner. Flavored olive oil makes a great gift choice.
Kitchen Themed Gifts for the Bride-to-Be
In addition to having every guest fill out a recipe card, you could suggest that they contribute a small kitchen item as a gift. It’s impossible to have too many kitchen tools and gadgets, and each person can select something that they just can’t live without.
Before her wedding day even arrives, the bride-to-be will have an assortment of indispensable tools that she can use to whip up delicious meals at home. As an added bonus, each guest can give advice about putting the various tools to effective use.
Kitchen Themed Bridal Shower Favors
A great bridal shower favor might be to provide the guests with small potted fresh herbs plants. You can get fresh herb plants for a good price and you can also generally find cute little plant pots for fairly cheap as well.
Plant the herbs in the pot and include a personalized favor sticker or tag on the plants.
My store on Zazzle has a variety of sticker and favor tag designs to choose from and others can be created on request.
If you like to bake or can, you can also give away baked goodies like cookies, fudge, chocolates, salsas, sauces, pickles, or jams. Again, you can just wrap them up and tag them with a personalized thank you sticker.
Of course, your bridal shower favor can be commercial chocolates, cookies or other food items as well. Maybe even flavored popcorn.
Other ideas include inexpensive salt and pepper sets, measuring or serving spoon sets, oil and vinegar sets, egg timers, pot scrubbers, kitchen towels, and more. There are lots of ideas online.
Decorating and Pulling it All Together
By choosing personalized recipe cards and invitations first, you will be able to select the right decorations and accessories with ease later.
While some people want to stick with the kitchen theme for everything, you can dress it up any way you want with flowers and patterns (damask, polka dots, stripes, checks) and any other thing you can think of.
The red, black, and white kitchen themed towel cake pictured here is a great idea for decorating for this theme and it makes a great gift too. They show you how to make it at this blog post on livinglocurto.com.
Go with a look that you know your bride-to-be will love. Before you know it, everything will be falling into place.
Bridal showers aren’t supposed to be formal affairs, but they are supposed to be fun and memorable. Having a theme really ties everything together, and few brides-to-be can resist the idea of a recipe-themed party. Furthermore, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who didn’t have at least one recipe to contribute.
Have Fun!
In no time, the day of the bridal shower will arrive. The guests will be tickled by the lovely way in which everything is pulled together, and the guest of honor will be flattered by all of the thoughtful touches.
The main reason to have a bridal shower is to get together and share advice about married life, and what better way to do so than by sharing tried-and-true recipes?
The kitchen is the beating heart of any home, and this type of bridal shower will set the stage for a very happy household. When you present the bride-to-be with the personalized recipe cards (and personalized recipe binder or recipe card box), all of the hard work and preparations will be worth it.
Posted by Shannon from Wasootch – a designer of unique special occasion stationery and customizable gifts.
