Jam Experiments

I’ve been on a little hiatus for the summer, but I’ve had good reason to do so! In June I got married in Atlanta, and in July, I went to Bali on my honeymoon. The good news is that jam was a central part of both of those experiences, so I will write about them here!

I had been thinking about how best to give jam to my wedding guests a while ago. In the week before the wedding the reality of executing the task became clear to me! Making 75 mini jam bottle was a time consuming and labor intensive task, but fortunately, I was supported through it by my wonderfully helpful mother in law and a very good friend named Sarah.

Jam making day, in my pajamas, a week before the wedding!

In a previous trip to Atlanta, in the winter, I had already made 25 bottles of Cranberry Kumquat jam – the recipe for which I have posted on this blog. Since it was now the summer, I decided to go with two summer flavors: strawberry and peach. I will share the specific recipes that I used later on in this blog. For the moment, I’ll share the process of making the jam, bottling the jam and displaying the jam at the wedding.

The three of us spent an entire day jam making. We cut fruit together, blanched the peaches and made two large vats of jam. Then we slowly transferred the jam into four ounce mason jars and sterilized them by putting them back in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes. The entire process took us about 7 hours.

Once we had all 75 bottles of jam in three flavors, we had to create a system of organizing the jams into escort cards. This meant that we put table numbers on each jam that corresponded with the guest’s names. This task could only be accomplished in the last few days before the wedding, when the final guest list was compiled and seating arrangements had been decided upon.

Michael’s jam on the top on the pile!

I designed these labels on Minted. They fit the wedding color scheme perfectly!

The next stage of the process was arranging the jams at the wedding venue. Our wedding planner wisely organized the jam alphabetically, but guests’ first names. In the chaos before the wedding, I could easily have arranged the bottles by table number, but that would have created a bottleneck at the wedding and guests would have taken forever to figure out where they were sitting. It’s the little things that matter when it comes to weddings, I’ve discovered!

Organizing the bottles of jam at the wedding.

The final display.

The guests loved the jam! They enjoyed the process of finding their names on the jam bottles. I tried t ensure that families received different flavors.

Guests finding their bottles.

Looking for their names.

While it was a lot of work, I loved making these jam bottles for my wedding. It added a personal touch to the affair and it allowed guests to have something special to bring home. In the inevitable avalanche of photos that surfaced in the days after the wedding, everybody posted pictures of their jam bottles!