Sweets for You

Ah the holiday season, with all its hustle and bustle. Running here, running there. Doing this, making that. Its been hard to find the time to scrap. In fact I don't think I've scrapped a page in a few weeks. I sure hope my Creative Team bosses don't fire me.

But I haven't been slacking. I had a Christmas Party yesterday with a few of my friends. I wanted to give them something unique, something they've never gotten before. Scrounging over the web - namely Pinterest - I came across the idea of giving the gift of cookie mix in a jar. Now here was just what I was looking for.

First I had to decide upon a recipe. I chose this Cowboy Cookie recipe from AllRecipes.com. I only hit two minor snags - the outrageous price of chocolate chips and pecans here in Japan. So I slightly altered the recipe. I only put in 3/4 cup of chocolate chips (which by the way is plenty!!) and I substituted walnuts for the pecans (still expensive but much more readily available). I also decreased the amounts of sugar ever so slightly for the Japanese taste. Of course I had to make a batch to sample for myself and let me tell you... these are GOOD cookies. I'm lucky that half of them even got baked because I am such a cookie-dough-aholic. Now I remember why I stopped baking years and years ago.

Then I went to our local 100 yen shop (the equivalent to the dollar stores) and found some 1 liter size glass jars.

Then the best part - other than eating cookie dough that is - was going over to the shop and deciding on which kit to use to decorate my jars. I'd had my eye on Cheer by Wendy Page for the past few weeks so decided to use it to make a jar label and a baking instructions card. The friends who I had the Christmas party with yesterday are all somewhat skilled in English, at least enough to be able to read the baking instructions as I was too lazy to even attempt to translate them in Japanese.

I love how the jars turned out. In discussions with some other scrappers on both Facebook and in the TDC forums, I learned that there are SO many different kinds of mixes you can give as gifts in a jar. Cookies, brownies, hot cocoa, soups. I will definitely be trying this again. It was fun to make and it really was accepted with huge smiles by my friends.

 

In the spirit of Christmas, if any of my dear blog friends would like to try this idea as well, I would like to offer a jar label and baking instructions card freebie download to you! The incrediby talented designer of the kit I used, Wendy Page, was more than happy to let me share this with you. If you love the kit as much as I do and think you can use it for other projects as well, please be sure to head over to her store.

Download Link Here

This freebie is made on an A4 sized paper which is just slightly longer and more narrow than an 8 1/2 x 11 sized page. So it should print out nicely on either size of paper. I don't have a lot of experience with uploading files to 4Shared for sharing as freebies. If for some reason you aren't able to access or download this file, please let me know in the comments section below and I'll try to find out the problem.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays to you.

Thank you so very much for stopping by my little corner of the web. Please come again soon!