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Edible Christmas Gifts

This year I wanted to make a bunch of our Christmas gifts and since I had picked up cooking on the regular again, I decided those handmade gifts would be edible. I also wanted to use all the glass jars that I had recently swapped over to plastic for storing staple cooking ingredients in that were now taking up precious space in our cabinets.

For the kids, I found a recipe for gingerbread pancake mix and decided that would be the focus of a gift bag. Everyone loves pancakes and those who say they don't have either not had really good pancakes, or are missing a part of their soul. I filled my largest jars with the mix, added a tag with instructions on how to mix and cook it, and added a few accessories to help jazz up breakfast. A gingerbread man cookie cutter went in to help shape the pancakes when they are cooked. A dozen gingerbread cookies were included with the intention of crumbling them and adding as a topping to the pancakes as well as a hand-mixed jar of sprinkles.

The cookies were made from a box of King Arthur Flour mix.


The gingerbread man shaped sprinkles were a random find at the local home goods outlet store. I mixed them with leftover white jimmies and non pareils for a gingerbread and "icing" look.


On their own, each piece was nice, but packaged together they made a pretty, hefty, and hopefully tasty package.


For the adults, I decided to do popcorn baskets, having lately been super obsessed with popcorn myself. I was basically eating it at least once a day.  As the base of the basket were 3 homemade items: bananas foster caramel corn, peppermint patty caramel corn, and hand mixed ranch seasoning.

The caramel corn itself was a lot easier to make than I expected, though my first test batch I used baking powder rather than baking soda. Yes, even though I told myself to make sure I was using the right one, somehow I still managed to mix them up. It tasted ok, and was a richer caramel color, but the next batch using the proper ingredient came out a lot lighter and less chewy.

For the bananas foster flavor, I added both rum and banana extract. I tossed the caramel and popcorn with chopped pecans and pieces of banana chips. I tossed some gold and white sprinkles on top to add some festive sparkle and baked the corn to dry. The sprinkles would have been better if they had been more obvious, but I wanted them to subtle. The gold stars and pearls were lost in the sea of caramel.



The peppermint patty batch was made just adding chopped peppermint patties to the mix, since I had a ton of candy leftover to use up. The sprinkles I mixed for this batch were white and icy blue with snowflake shapes thrown in and stood out a bit more on the caramel than the stars did.



Once the popcorn was made, I put the baskets together, throwing the ranch seasoning into another glass jar, but smaller. I added an oil spritzer, and a box of quality microwavable popcorn, and packaged everything together with plastic popcorn boxes and bowls.






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