A thoughtful kitchen gift: Cake Spice

 

 In my post about the Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Muffins, I noted that Jocelyn's recipe calls for a homemade Cake Spice mix.  It occurred to me that making up jars of this spice mix might be a great idea for a kitchen gift.  Jocelyn says it can be used in any recipe in place of cinnamon, and that it adds a warm and spicy flavor.  The blend includes equal amounts of allspice, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and star anise.  I don't ordinarily care for anise, but blended with all of the other spices I might not even notice.

Here's the link to Jocelyn's recipe: Homemade Cake Spice.  It can be mixed up quickly and easily and packaged in small jars.  I'm definitely trying this for myself and possibly for a kitchen gift or two as well!

A sweet gift idea

 

Photo from Courtney at Pizzazzerie

 I saved the above photo some time ago with the idea of making a similar kitchen gift. The ideas for  Snow Day Drinks and Treats gift sets came from Courtney at Pizzazzerie.   As you see, this particular gift included a homemade tea mix and some cookies.  

In 2018 I wrote a post about all of the gift set ideas here: Some fun new ideas for kitchen gifts.  

But now, inspired by the title of this tea mix (Quiet Time Tea), I am thinking that one of these sets plus some Bible study helps or books might be a lovely gift for a special friend.  I mentioned The Daily Grace Co. a few days ago, and their products could make this gift so beautiful.

You could add a prayer journal

or a regular journal

or a mug

And, if this was for a very special friend, you could package it all in one of Daily Grace's totes.

 I have friends who would love a gift like this!

The tentative 2020 Kitchen Gifts list

 

Just one more list for food gifts:

 Cinnamon Pretzels are super easy and go nicely in pretty dollar store tins.

Christmas Granola is next in line, and it's so simple.  I use my regular formula for Homemade Granola.  After it's baked, while still warm, I stir in dried cranberries and shelled pistachios (red and green, get it?) to taste.  Voila!  Christmas Granola!

Hot Chocolate Mix is next, and this is my own recipe.  It always seems to go over well, and sometimes people bring the jars back for a refill.

Bran Muffins sounds like a rather mundane Christmas gift, but I'll explain.  Years ago I started giving my mother-in-law containers of Bran Muffin Batter at Christmas.  (The first year, I gave her silicone muffin pans as well.)  In more recent years, it's become more difficult for my mother-in-law to bake, so I just bake the muffins myself, using the same batter recipe, and give her a half dozen or so.  I've also experimented a bit with cutting the sugar in the recipe by about 1/3.  I think it calls for 3 cups and I cut it back to 2 cups.  It is still plenty sweet.

And lastly on the list is Christmas Jam from Kitty's Kozy Kitchen.  I made this in 2018 and so loved giving it as part of a gift basket or using as a hostess gift.  We will see if I can find time to make some again this year.

In addition, I'm also planning to bake these little Apricot Fruitcakes.  These are a great favorite with a loved one on my list, and I think she deserves to enjoy some this Christmas.  They are fun to bake and give.

And that's my tentative kitchen gifts list!  We'll see how the actual list compares when all is said and done.

Recipe ideas for Christmas dinner

I don't know yet exactly what we will be having for Christmas dinner, but I felt it might be a good time for a post with some recipe ideas.  There's still plenty of time to get to the grocery store for ingredients.  I'll share a few thoughts for the main course and some sides, and save the dessert ideas for another day.

One main course I've made several times for Christmas dinner is Ranch House Chicken.  I use this recipe for Ranch House Pork Chops with Parmesan Mashed Potatoes and substitute chicken for the pork chops.  I have never made the Parmesan mashed potatoes, because we usually serve a different mashed potato dish (as you will see later). 

Photo from Real Mom Kitchen

 Also, whenever I make this chicken, I use a very simple homemade ranch dressing mix.  This dish produces a really tasty gravy.

Here's the recipe for the Ranch Dressing Mix, in case you need it:

RANCH DRESSING MIX

2 Tblsp. plus 2 tsp. dried minced onion
1 Tblsp. dried parsley flakes
2 1/2 tsp. paprika
2 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. pepper
1 1/2 tsp. garlic powder

In a small bowl, combine all ingredients. Store in airtight container -- a jar, tin, or small plastic container would work well. For each packet of ranch dressing mix called for in a recipe, use 1 Tblsp. of this mix.

 Another main course idea is for roast pork.  We seldom eat pork or beef these days, but I've made pork roasts in the past and found a couple of recipes we really enjoyed.  This Rosemary Pork Roast is one of them, and I highly recommend it.  Just be very careful not to overcook it.

(Photo by Taste of Home)

For sides, mashed potatoes are a given at our house.  The Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes recipe is our family's go-to for any large holiday meal that requires mashed potatoes.  They are really, really good.

(Photo by Taste of Home)

A couple other vegetable ideas: in New England, it seems that squash is often a favorite side for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners.  It always was when I was growing up, so I often tend to serve it.  This recipe: Whipped Butternut Squash is from an older Taste of Home magazine and is  wonderful!

(Photo by Taste of Home)

Here's an idea that I haven't tried: Green Beans with Roasted Grape Tomatoes.  With its festive red and green colors, this side dish, from an older December issue of Country Woman magazine, would be a natural for Christmas dinner.

We always like a festive salad with Christmas dinner, and this  Merry Berry Salad

(Photo by Taste of Home)

is the one I usually choose to make.  We especially like the easy, homemade cranberry vinaigrette dressing.

Cranberry sauce is a must if we're serving chicken, and I love this recipe for  Jellied Cranberry Sauce  that I found last year via Chowhound.

Photo from Chowhound

Or,  this Paradise Cran-Applesauce recipe makes a beautiful and lovely side dish that would be good with pork,  turkey or chicken.  No spices; just the wonderful, unadulterated flavors of apples and cranberries.

Photo from Taste of Home

So there you have a few of my Christmas dinner ideas.  If you needed inspiration, I hope you've found some.  Desserts to follow!

Some fun new ideas for kitchen gifts

If you've read here for long, you already know that I just love making and giving kitchen gifts at Christmas time!  You can click "kitchen gifts" in the label cloud to see some of the foods that I like to prepare and gift. 

Today I have some fresh inspiration to share with you all regarding kitchen gifts.  Snow Day Drinks and Treats gift sets, from Courtney at Pizzazzerie will give you some great ideas for your kitchen gifting.

This post includes recipes and free printables -- so sweet.  There are printable labels for the coffee bags in which the drink mixes would be packaged, and tags for the bags you'd package the sweet accompanying treats in.

You can choose from three beverage mix recipes:

🎄"Bundle Up Blend" -- a cinnamon spice ground coffee
🎄"Cuddle Up Cocoa" -- a homemade hot cocoa mix
🎄 Quiet Time Tea -- a spiced chai instant tea mix

And then you can choose from the following treats (recipes provided!)

🎄 "Candy Cane" Homemade Marshmallows
🎄 Winter Spice Tea Cookies
🎄 Vanilla Almond Biscotti

Obviously, the biscotti is intended to be paired with the coffee; the cookies with the chai tea mix; and the marshmallows with the hot cocoa.

Or, you could gift any of these separately.  But the sets are just so cute!  I'll show one example, below.  You will want to head over to Pizzazzerie to see the rest.

Photo from Pizzazzerie

What lovely kitchen gifts these would be for the friends and neighbors on your list!  These ideas have certainly inspired me.  How about you?

A wonderful little kitchen gift!

Oh, my, do I have a great kitchen gift idea for you!  This Hot Chocolate Mug Cake from Denise at RefreshHer is one of the best things I have tasted in a long time.  And it was SO easy!

I did leave out the nuts and the cinnamon, because I prefer my chocolate unadulterated.  I also assembled my ingredients a little bit differently than Denise did.  She just put them all in the mug and stirred them up, but I decided to sift the dry ingredients together and put them into a zip-top sandwich bag along with the chocolate chips.  I sifted them onto waxed paper and could easily roll the waxed paper up a bit to transfer the mix to the sandwich bag.

Since I was out of miniature marshmallows, and probably would have wanted fresh ones for this recipe anyway, I picked some up at Wal*mart.  I was so surprised to find this tiny bag of Campfire marshmallows which will fit right in the top of the mug.  It was 39¢ and so cute, I just had to use it.  The bag is about 3 inches by 4 1/2 inches and contains one ounce of marshmallows.  I think it would likely contain enough marshmallows for two mug cakes. 

My directions were going to vary a bit from the download Denise linked to (since I left out two ingredients), so I made up my own tag to use with the mix.  I just tucked the tag into the mug with the packets of mix and marshmallows.

I had some sweet "Winter Wonderland" paper bags and used one of them to package the mug in.  I folded the top down, punched two holes and threaded some baker's twine through to tie the bag shut.  Then I added a homemade gift tag from one of 2015's Christmas cards!

 Mr. T and I tried out the mug cake recipe last night and shared the cake.   It was absolutely delicious and so easy to make.  Our mug that we used was rather tall, so we used iced tea spoons to eat the cake.

Christmas mugs would be fun to use for this, also!

I can think of many, many people who would enjoy a gift like this: teens, college students, singles, busy moms and dads, older folks who no longer bake ... the list could go on and on.  Have fun with this idea!  And if you were inspired by the post or if you make a mug cake, leave Denise a comment and tell her so!

From the October archives here in the Christmas kitchen ..

In both of my blogs, I've been trying to do a couple posts from the archives each month.  In the process of trying to do so for October,  I've found that there were some Octobers when I didn't post here at all.  Shame on me!  The only excuse I can come up with is that October tends to be a busy month for us and a time when we often have traveled somewhere.  For whatever reason, there's a scarcity of posts in the October archives.

As a result, I only have a few links to share today.  Here goes:

From 2007, Easy Patchwork Coasters are a project I've made many times and referred to many times on both blogs.  They're not really patchwork, but look that way as a result of folding, stitching, and turning.  A project I highly recommend for using up smallish scraps of Christmas fabric!

This Advent Countdown project is one I did some years ago from a Gooseberry Patch Christmas book.  I actually made three of these.  It took some time but was a very rewarding project.

This post on Baking, Beverage, and Seasoning Mixes shares a link to a long list of such mixes.  I love giving these as part of a gift basket!

A fun little gift for a 1-year-old is fabric alphabet letters to play with and, as they get older, to spell out words.

And lastly, I blogged about a favorite kids' book from my own childhood: The Animals’ Merry Christmas!

Hope you've enjoyed this quick browse through the archives!

Some small and simple kitchen gifts

I've blogged about this before, but I was looking back in my July archives and decided to share it again.  This post from July 2007 details my nifty idea for Christmas giving -- I'd been inspired by seeing some spice mixes packaged in fabric bags along with recipes, and thought this would be an idea I'd like to try.

This 2012 post shares a link for many baking, beverage, and seasoning mixes as well as some of my own recipes.

And this post from my regular blog, written in 2010,  describes the Kitchen Gift in a Pie Plate which is pictured at the top of the post.  This was such a fun gift to put together!

You can see that I've made pumpkin pie spice and apple pie spice, and then I made some of my favorite pie recipes into a little cookbook to go along with them, packaging the entire gift in a unique spatterware pie plate. 

[Edited to add: You can find these recipe cards at Graphic Garden.  In the left sidebar you will see the category "Free Printables."  Down near the bottom of the list, click on "Recipe Cards".  There are so many beautiful designs to choose from!  The  ones I've used here are from the "Seasonal" category and are called "Winter cabin/blank".  At the top of the "Recipe Cards" page, you will find detailed instructions for how to use them.  You can either print them out blank and write on them, or save them to your computer and type on them as I have done here. ]  

I'm starting to get inspired by the mix idea all over again, in fact.  Hope others have as much fun with this idea as I did!

Quick cookie mix -- a recipe to try for next Christmas!

Photo from Taste of Home

I was browsing through a Country Woman Christmas issue from a couple of years ago and came upon this Quick Cookie Mix to keep in the fridge for Christmas baking.  Four different cookies can be made from one mix: Peanut Blossoms, Toffee Triangles, Apricot Thumbprints, and Butter Almond cookies.  Such mixes seldom tempt me, but I am seriously thinking of trying this one soon, for a couple of reasons.


 For one, these cookies are all somewhat distinctive.  You could never tell they all came from the same basic mix.  For another thing, other than the red and green sugar on the peanut blossom variation, these cookies are not overly Christmasy at all, but merely festive.  They would be good anytime one had to make a lot of pretty cookies rather quickly.  For yet another, the mix does not use shortening as many cookie mixes do, but uses real butter.  Much nicer, more flavorful, and better for you.  I think that the next time I need cookies for an occasion, I'll give this mix a try!

The actual Christmas baking list for 2016

Last year's list

Every year I post a tentative baking list of cookies, candy, snacks, etc. that I plan to give as kitchen gifts.  And it seems as if every year, that list gets tweaked in a major way.  You can find my tentative 2016 list in an October post.  Meanwhile, here's what actually got baked or otherwise prepared in my Christmas kitchen this season!  I've included links just in case anyone is still interested in baking.

Whipped Shortbread Cookies
 
Almond Shortbread Thumbprints

Eggnog Log Cookies

Photo by Taste of Home

Chocolate Spritz
Chocolate Mint Crisps
Coconut Gingeroons (I'll share this recipe soon)

Chocolate Mint Crisps (photo by Taste of Home)

Sacher Torte Cookies

Sacher Torte Cookies

Date-Nut Casserole Cookies
 Then there was candy, as well:
Cookies 'n' Cream Fudge
Marbled Peanut Butter Fudge (an experiment that didn't really succeed.  I'll blog about it eventually)
Chocolate Dipped Orange Slices
Heavenly Delight
Coffee Shop Fudge

Coffee Shop Fudge -- photo from Taste of Home

 Arlene’s Easy Fudge

And several more kitchen gifts:
Hot Chocolate Mix

 Bran Muffins
Little Apricot Cakes (recipe shared a few days ago)
White Chocolate Snack Mix
 Cinnamon Pretzels.

And that was it for this year's baking output!

My "Kitchen Gifts" Pinterest board

Some gifts from my own Christmas Kitchen

I tried to write this post several days ago.  I thought it would be nice to share some of the pins from my Kitchen Gifts Pinterest board.  I had the post all written, links in place and working, pictures added -- then something went wrong and the entire post disappeared completely while iPhoto popped up in its place.  I still don't know what happened; I've never had an occurrence like that before.

Anyhow, I am going to try and reconstruct the post.  I was planning to do one post concerning my Kitchen Gifts board here in my Christmas kitchen, and another on my regular blog, Across my Kitchen Table.
Blogger has been giving me fits with my links lately, so every time I add a link I must go into the HTML and take out stuff that Blogger has put in there extraneously.  It's very frustrating and makes doing posts with links quite the adventure.  Here goes:
To start with something sweet, this Smooth as Silk Fudge from Mandy's Recipe Box sounds delicious!

Photo by Mandy's Recipe Box

It's made with Symphony candy bars!

Reindeer Chow, from This Silly Girl's Life, is a fun variation on puppy chow or muddy buddies.

photo from This Silly Girl's Life

Or how about this Copycat Cowboy Bark from Averie Cooks?  It sounds loaded!

photo from Averie Cooks

This Warm Wishes cocoa mix from bhg is packaged in such a nifty way!  When I followed the link, though, I had some difficulty in accessing this project.  When I finally did get there, I found that specific instructions were not given.  One was instructed to put a bag of hot cocoa mix in the center of a far and add marshmallows and peppermints on the sides, then add a tag and bow.  Sounds fairly simple, though I think I might bag the marshmallows too to keep them soft.

photo from bhg.com

I can think of a couple of people I might give these to.

Lastly, a couple of sweet packaging ideas!   If you follow the links to bhg.com, you will also find links to the recipes pictured with the packaging.
The doily-wrapped foil pan is perfect for giving a family an entire 13x9 pan of goodies.

photo from bhg.com

And last of all for this post (I will quit while I'm ahead) is a way to give one or several cookies as individually bagged cookies.  I have a few people in mind to give these to as well!

photo by bhg.com

So there you have it!  Lord willing, there will be a similar post at Across my Kitchen table, with different pins featured, so you will want to check them both out along with visiting my Pinterest board!