One of the features common to all weddings is catering, and in most cases, there is an excessive quantity of food available. Not necessarily an excessive variety (you can never have too much choice, which is why having 20 different flavours of crepes at you wedding is a great idea) but the quantities available are usually excessive. Basically, you’ve got to be sure your guests will not go away from your wedding complaining about a lack of food.
But what happens to the unused food? It would be nice to think that it ends up at a food bank somewhere, or goes to good causes. However, I suspect that it usually just find it’s way into a hotel bin, which is a shame.
So apart from a slice of two of souvenir wedding cake (and as I’ve said before, nobody really likes wedding cake, so I suspect that it is just a case of grabbing a souvenir) and maybe a bag of Haribos and fizzy sweets from the (now ubiquitous) candy cart, not much else from the amounts of food available finds its way home.
To be fair, it’s probably not likely that you will want to scrape some leftover beef and potatoes into your handbag to re-heat for lunch the day after. Some of the bite-sized cheesecake type desserts probably wouldn’t keep too well overnight and wouldn’t be worth the effort of taking home anyway. Typical canapes are a possibility, but usually at that point in the day, you will be extremely hungry so will want to get as many down you as possible rather than thinking about squirreling them away for a future date. (But we would always recommend opting for crepes as an alternative to canapes at your wedding anyway : more choice, more stylish, more filling!)
So what’s this about crepes? Well, we have extensive experience of offering crepes at weddings, so we have a pretty good idea of whether they constitute a suitable “doggie bag” option. And the answer to that is: yes and no. We usually advise that the crepes are eaten straight away, so the process is usually this: your guests make their choice from our extensive menu, come along to our mobile crepe cart and then place their order. Once the crepe has been made and served, they can either wander off and enjoy their nutella or sugar & lemon pancake and mingle with the rest of the guests, or, as the crepes will stay hot for some time, they can be left a while if preferred.But essentially, they are designed to be eaten straight away.
Occasionally we get asked whether the crêpes can re-heated the day after. And we always advise that they should ideally be consumed there and there for maximum enjoyment.
However, we were at one event ( a garden party in leafy suburb of Manchester) where the host was expecting overseas visitors the following day so she asked whether we could make some “plain” crepes for her to freeze, to be used the following day. We have no idea how this turned out, but our mobile crepe stand has been hired again for a repeat party later this summer, so it will be interesting to find out.
So in summary, a wedding isn’t really an ideal place to think about doggie bags and there probably isn’t much that can be done about the likely waste of good food in most cases. However, freezing unused crepes is one possibility – but they really are best eaten hot.
