The 12 Days of Craftmas {8}: treats in a jar

Yesterday Carla showed us the perfect gift for the sweet-toothed and today's post is about another three foodie ideas that will delight avid cooks and make life easier for those who find it tricky to get their apron out ;-)

1. Jar filled with biscuit mix

The idea behind this is to give someone a beautiful jar filled with the dry ingredients for a biscuit recipe that they will only have to add eggs and butter to. Then all they have to do is mix it and put it in the oven!

You can make it more personal with a favourite recipe and decorate it with matching string, paper or material on the lid and it looks great, don't you think?

Bakerella 

Bakerella

Bakerella

You can find the recipe here along with more photos of the version that Bakerella showed on her blog because we love how she combined the pink smarties with the labels and also because you can download the same labels from the website :).

2. Jar filled with hot chocolate mix

Another option is to prepare the ingredients for a good hot chocolate with cocoa, sugar, little biscuits or, in the American version, mini marshmallows. You can decorate the jar with tissue paper and even add a small bottle of Kahlúa to go with it as shown on the Hey Gorgeous blog.

Hey Gorgeous

Hey Gorgeous

Another idea for presentation. Photo by David Prince

3. Flavoured salt

For people who prefer savoury food, you could prepare a jar of salt flavoured with spices. It can be used with meat, stews or even to prepare dressings and you can tailor it to people's tastes.

We think this idea from the Sarah Hearts blog is really nice and you can also print off the labels she uses here.

Sarah Hearts

Sarah Hearts

Do you like the idea? Can you think of any other alternatives along the same lines?

Olga

The 12 Days of Craftmas {1}: mittens

Every year, I decide months in advance that I will make interesting Christmas gifts for people. I always plan to be really organised (after leaving it too late the previous year) and then suddenly time vanishes and I realise I've got plenty of ideas but haven't actually made anything yet and it's only a few weeks to go till Christmas...and there are parties to go to, people to see, a house to decorate and mince pies to eat in between. In a bid to break this cycle, we are going to do a series of 12 posts on Christmas gifts you can make yourself (hopefully in time for Christmas) and we'll try to add one or two of our own projects to the mix. Fingers crossed this will help us start crafting and give you some inspiration too. There's no time like the present (geddit?) so let's kick off the series with this lovely tutorial from Etsy.

Etsy

Visit this Etsy page for a nice breakdown of the instructions. It's fairly self-explanatory, just find an old and pretty jumper then trace your hand and stitch! If you wanted to, you could even find some nice fleecy material to line them and make them extra warm.

How are you at getting organised with these sorts of things? Have you got plans to make anything? Let us know where you found your inspiration or share your ideas with us and we might even include it in this series of posts. We've got a really nice tutorial planned for the next post in the series so stay tuned!

Have a nice and crafty weekend :)

Carla