The goal was to reuse and recycle as much as we could. Here's how it turned out.

Aisle Decorations: Paper Roses in Cereal Box Paper cones
Roses are made of coffee filters (didn't use recycled filters because of the color issue). See Martha Stewart or mommymakesroses.com for directions. http://www.marthastewart.com/article/paper-roses 
The paper cones are cereal boxes cut and shaped and then covered in paper shopping bags.


Family Boutonnieres 
Same paper roses in a smaller size mixed in with silk hydrangas petals and embellishments.
Packaged in a recycled paper bakery boxes filled with raffia.


Card Box
Random used shipping boxes covered first in white calender paper (good ole free Chinese calenders) and then in satin ribbon. I was able to uses pieces of ribbon that had already been cut but gone unused for other projects. I started by alternating the 1.5" green and chococlate brown ribbon. But it was too loud. I toned it town by stripping in skinnier ribbon. Everything was held together with hot glue and double stick tape...I adore double stick tape. 


Homemade Jam Favors
Each guest received 1.5 oz of homemade jam. The available flavors were pineapple, meyer-lemon blueberry marmalade, vanilla bean-meyer lemon marmalade, and kumquat - vanilla bean marmalade. Except for the pineapple and vanilla beans, all the citrus fruit was picked from my parents' and close friends
trees. I made them a few months before the date and water processed the jars. It was time consuming in a large part because I knew the bitter taste that is part of marmalade would not sit well with our majority asian crowd. To minimize that flavor component I painstakingly scrapped every bit of pith off who knows how many citrus fruit. The marmalades that turned out are the best I (and quite a few people I know) have ever had and was a great use of the abundant winter citrus crop. I am really proud of these.


The Biggie...Cakes
I made our two December wedding cakes - one traditional two tiered buttercream number and a second Wii groom's cake. We actually had three cakes that reception. It was near my sister's b-day so I made her an apple-date cake with cream cheese frosting

My wedding present to the groom for our May reception was an Oski cake. Oski is the Cal Berkeley mascot. The traditional cake for May was included in our reception fee and from Torrance Bakery.

The traditional tiered Dec cake was a white chocolate feather cake frosted and filled with swiss buttercream. It was served with fresh blueberry topping. It is a recipe from the Cake Bible by Rose Levy Berebaum. Very yummy cake and easy to work with. I actually started making it two weeks before, so froze most of the layers with no problem. I used a topping instead of a blueberry filling to ensure everything would be fresher tasting. It was a two tiered square cake (12" two layers and 8" three layers) with simple decorations. The swiss buttercream was smoothed down and then I used an ombre blue 1.5" ribbon around the bottom of both tiers. The tiered cake could actually serve about 100. Everyone had a slice of the apple date and white feather and took at least one slice of their fav home. Even after that we still have half of the top tier in our freezer. 

The Wii and Oski are fully edible, but I knew I wanted to keep them so they are made out of rice treats instead of cake. Wii is my first fondant cake..so it is rough. I was learning as I made it. The most obvious mistake is I didn't frost the rice treats before I put the fondant on..so the fondant surface is bumpy like rice krispy. Not very Wii like, but it was good enough to fool folks. At first glace most people thought my husband had brought his Wii to the reception so we could play it. I also included controller and nunchuck. I love baking, so these projects were a lot of fun. 

Left to Right (Wii cake, traditional two tiered cake, birthday apple-date cake, Torrance Bakery four tiered cake, Oski cake)