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Turning Your Kitchen Into Santa’s Workshop
Today, we’re going to talk about turning your kitchen into a factory for edible Christmas gifts to make in advance of the holidays or just in time.
Old School
Back in my day… the holidays meant that Mom was going to go on a month-long baking frenzy. It was absolutely glorious. My sister and I got to help make the cookies that would fill the house with a wonderful aroma while they cooled. Christmas music played. Decorations festooned every shelf and horizontal surface in the house.
Then the cookies would go into the Tupperware containers for safe keeping. Some would go into decorative tins that would be secured with ribbon and tagged for family members.
Homemade chocolate chip cookies were the most tempting, but we loved all of them. The family-wide hands down absolute favorite were Mom’s Thimble Cookies. Grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts eagerly awaited the holidays just to get those Thimble Cookies!
The great thing is, this is still a perfectly acceptable way to make edible Christmas gifts. There is nothing more pleasing than a batch of homemade cookies from a friend or loved one. Every family has someone with a specialty. My Great Grandmother made these incredible cookies that she called Russian Tea Cookies. Whatever they actually were, they were delicious… but only if you dunked them in tea.
Otherwise, they were hard as concrete. The shocking thing is that this was by design.
Apparently, in the days before Tupperware, they baked the cookies so they’d be stale from the get-go and could only be rendered edible by dunking them in tea.
Note: Her “bullseye cookies” are very similar to Mom’s Thimble Cookies except that
Thimble Cookies have an egg wash brushed over the cookie instead of the dusting of confectioner’s sugar
With an extensive Christmas music playlist, ample supplies of ingredients, time and airtight packaging you can provide quick and easy gifts for family and friends by simply cranking out a sleighful of cookies.
Sand Art
The only drawback to homemade cookies is that if you start too early, even the best packaging won’t keep the cookies from tasting a bit sorry before Christmastime is over. Somewhere along the line, somebody had an ingenious idea.
Cookie mix kits that look like sand art! Take a mason jar or other decorative glass container with a tight-fitting lid and layer the ingredients for a cake or a batch of cookies into it like sand art. I’m not sure when the idea came about, but I never heard of these marvelous kits prior to the 1990s.
The greatest thing about these edible gifts is that they won’t go stale as quickly as prepared cookies since it is simply a jar of loose ingredients.
The gift is visually appealing and it leaves it up to the recipient to decide when or even if they’ll bake the cookies. If the cookies you’ve selected contain something they’re allergic to or have a medical restriction on, they can always regift the jar to someone with no harm done.
Getting Creative
Nowadays, we have channels and channels of celebrity TV chefs as well as clever, crafty moms who aren’t afraid to share their best ideas for making tasty treats to share for Christmas. I’ve gathered oodles of ideas for you below.
| Some Variety! | ||
| Timely Tips | ||
| More Sand Art Christmas Cookie Kits | ||
For more ideas, just hit up your favorite search engine for edible Christmas gift ideas