Triple Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix In A Jar

I'm a big fan of giving and receiving Christmas gifts that can be used up, whether that's eaten, drunk, poured into a bath or spent.  Unless I know someone wants something very specific, I always try to give them something I know they will be able to use up and won't have to keep lying around the house for years to come.  Last year, I gave several friends and relatives homemade jars of cookie mix as part of their present.  They went down really, really well so I'm doing a few more this year.

After trawling the Internet for hours last year trying to find the perfect cookie-in-a-jar recipe, I ended up combining a couple and adjusting the quantities to perfectly fit the 750ml jars I had.  The recipe below will fill this size jar perfectly and you can easily increase the quantities of each ingredient by, say, 25% to fit litre jars.

Of course, you have to do a trial run of the cookies, just to make sure they're good enough to give out as gifts...that's my excuse, anyway.  I don't like 'hard' cookies, so when I sampled the recipe, I baked the cookies for 10 minutes which gave a lovely, soft chewy texture.  If you like them more crunchy, bake for a few minutes longer until they're just right for you.

Triple-Chocolate-Chip-Cookie-Mix-In-A-Jar Recipe

Fills one 750 ml jar

60g white chocolate chips

60g dark chocolate chips

60g milk chocolate chips

15g Rice Krispies 

150g plain flour

Half tsp of bicarbonate of soda

Quarter tsp of baking powder

80g dark brown soft sugar

75g caster sugar

30g porridge oats

Layer the ingredients into your jar in any order you like, but see the tip below on the brown sugar.

Attach a label to your jar with the following instructions:

-----------------

Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

Makes 24 small or 12 enormous cookies

1. Preheat oven to 180 C / Gas 4. 

2. In a large bowl, cream 75g of butter or margarine until light and fluffy. Mix in 1 egg and 1 additional egg yolk. Add the contents of the jar and stir until well blended.

3. Dollop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a baking tray.

4. Bake for 10 minutes for a soft, chewy cookie, or a couple of minutes longer for a crunchier cookie. Remove from baking trays to cool on wire racks.

-----------------

Tips on filling your jar

Obviously, you want the jars to look pretty but I found it a lot harder than it looks to get perfectly neat layers!  I just spooned the different ingredients into the jar and levelled them out as best I could.  

One thing I do recommend, is to mix the brown and white sugars together before adding them to the jar.  

Dark brown sugar has a tendency to harden and I read lots of comments on other cookie jar recipes from people who found they had to hack away at the brown sugar layer to get it out the jar!  Mixing the two certainly worked for me, and a jar I kept back for a couple of months was fine when I came to use it. 

Decorate your jar any way you like - I keep things simple with a length of ribbon and a customised gift tag.  Those retro style card luggage tags you can buy in stationery shops for pennies are perfect as they're big enough to write the baking instructions on!  

P.S How cute are my Santa and polar bear?  We had an almost identical Santa when I was a toddler in the 80s and I loved him. I was delighted when I saw this 2012 version in M & S and had to have him and his polar bear friend. Tacky, you say? Absolutely :-)

Jenny

x

My first completed hand embroidery!

I have become a bit addicted to Pinterest lately and one of the first things to catch my eye was this quote which had been pinned by my Twitter Buddy, Anna Burnell (whose lovely blog you should check out, incidentally):

Source

If the quote kind of sums me up, it most definitely sums up my tea-drinking, bookworm Mum so I knew immediately I wanted to incorporate it into a gift for her.  I decided to have a go at hand embroidery and just hope it turned out pretty enough to wrap up in a big pink bow and present to my Mum as a birthday gift.  

I decided I wanted my embroidery to consist of a huge teacup sitting on a pile of books, with the quote across the top.  I roughly sketched out on paper how I wanted the finished embroidery to look: 

Sketch of embroidery layout

I traced the outline of my sketch onto my sheet of white cotton in tailor's chalk*  and got to work. I was originally going to embroider all the details but decided to applique the book covers on to add a bit more depth and because I liked the idea of them being solid blocks of colour but not the idea of the many, many hours that would take me to achieve in hand embroidery.

I had intended to leave the embroidery in its wooden hoop, but when I finished, I decided it would look better in a frame.  This also had the benefit of disguising the absolute disaster of tangled threads and knots on the rear of the fabric. I'm all about the presentation and hiding the chaos behind the scenes so this was a good solution. 

(Excuse the poor photography. I was in a rush and still had to iron my masterpiece and

 mount it on black card to stop the tangled thread disasters showing through the cotton)

Overall, I'm pleased with how it turned out and really like the appliqued book covers.  They were fiddly to cut out from the fabric but they ended up looking how I hoped they would.  I'm also glad I used my own handwriting for the quote, rather than some nameless font or existing letters pattern.  It makes the gift much more personal and anyone who knows me will instantly know the embroidery is my work, due to my handwriting not having changed since about Year 3 (I can write in joined-up letters too, honest).  Most importantly, the birthday girl loved it, yay! 

I'm definitely loving the hand embroidery and have already started a little seaside picture for my own home.  I just need to learn how to effectively manage those knots and tangles...

Jenny

   x

*I now know tailor's chalk to be the work of the devil and next to impossible to remove from white cotton, grrrr.