Blogmas Day 22 | DIY: Homemade Christmas Gift

I love adding a personal touch to presents. There are a couple of friends, and a couple of people I work with I wanted to give presents to, but just couldn't think what to get them - but they all love food, so I thought that was a good place to start.

This is what my gift ended up looking like:

To do this I used (per present):

Homemade Chocolate Truffles
Homemade Peppermint Creams
2 Sweet Bags
A Jar
Ribbon
Gift Tag
Small piece of material

Apart from the chocolates I bought everything from The Range

What I did:

1) Add a handful of truffles to one sweet bag and a handful of peppermint creams to another

2) Layer these into the jar.

3) Cut out a piece of festive slightly larger than the lid of your jar.

4) Tie this around the lid with a piece of ribbon (a festive ribbon at Christmas of course!)

5) Add a little label saying who it's for, who it's from, and what's in the jar!

*TIP* Do this in a cold room, or by the fridge so you can take the chocolates directly out of the fridge and place them in the bags. I didn't do this, and under my hot kitchen lights they began to melt and some of the chocolate has squashed - sorry to whoever gets that jar! It's still made with love and thought though!

Hope you like this little gift idea. It'd be great if you were making the chocolates for yourself, and needed a last minute present idea, or if you have some friends who love food - like mine!

Merry Christmas. See you tomorrow for more blogmas.

Love, Hannah x

Blogmas Day 20 | DIY: Christmas Table Name Place Cards

Every year we have Christmas at our house and this year there will be nine of us for Christmas Dinner. We've hosted for maybe the past four or five years now and each year we have recycled name place cards I made a long time ago. (It's much easier if we put name cards on the table, saves all the hassle of nobody knowing where they need to sit)

Anyway, this year we have decided to mix it up a bit and be very rock and roll and make new place cards!

It's something you can do really cheaply and I think adds a little bit of something extra to a Christmas Table.

A few days ago I went to The Range and picked up a few bits and pieces for not a lot of money.

Here is what I bought...

Here is what I ended up creating:

 

I made nine name place cards but here are just three.

Really simple, Really Quick, Really Affordable.

Hope you might get some inspiration from these...

Love, Hannah x

Blogmas Day 8 | Recipe: Cinder Toffee/Honeycomb

It's time for another baking recipe! My last couple, Peppermint Creams and Baked Apple, were really popular so I hope you enjoy this one as much!

I've been trying for months to get this recipe right. I practiced with one recipe, and it was just too complicated and I ended up burning the sugar each time! My mum and Dad, and my friends have been very patient with this one as they have had to try some terrible things!

But I finally have found a recipe that works, and that is super easy to do! I modified the original recipe that I took from BBC Food slightly and I've ended up with something super delicious! It's really simple, requires very few ingredients and can be done very quickly.

If you want to make something that looks a little bit like this, keep reading for the Recipe:

 

 

You Will Need:

 

200g Caster Sugar

40ml Runny Honey

1 tbsp. Liquid Glucose

3/4 tsp. Bicarbonate of Soda

50ml Water

 

 

What to do:

 

1) Line a Baking Tray with baking parchment.

 

2) Into a large pan add the sugar, honey, Liquid Glucose and Water

 

*TIP* when measuring out the honey and liquid glucose warm the measuring spoon with boiling water and the honey and glucose will stick to it less!

 

3)Bring ingredients to the boil in a pan

If you have a sugar thermometer heat until the mixture is 160C, if you don't (like I didn't) heat for about 4 minutes until the mixtures bubbles are almost clear (you'll know what I mean when you see it)

 

4) At this point take the pan off the heat and allow to cool for approximately 30 seconds

 

5)Whisk in the Bicarbonate of Soda really quickly. The mixture will more than double in size and turn from a cloudy colour to an orange ''honeycomb'' colour. Be careful that the mixture doesn't touch your hand as it might be hot.

 

6) Pour the mixture into the lined baking tray. It might continue to increase in size but will shrink down eventually.

 

7) Leave the honeycomb to cool for 30 minutes 

 

Here is what mine looked like a couple of minutes into it's cooling time

 




8) Break into shards and serve

  

 

This would make the ideal sweet snack, sweet treat gift or small pieces could be used as a cake topping!

 

I hope you enjoyed reading this and you have a go yourself!

 

Enjoy!

 

Love, Hannah x

 





Blogmas Day 6 | DIY: Really Quick Gift Tags

I've been making a few of my own gift tags lately. I'm going to wrap presents in a very mismatched way this year, and I think that brown wrapping paper and a homemade gift tag would make the present look really cute. I'll be posting about wrapping presents later on in Blogmas but for the moment here are some gift tags that I have been making. They are super quick, really easy and creative and very affordable!

What you will need:

 

As with the Christmas Cards in yesterday's blogmas, once you have the materials the designs are entirely up to you.

Here are a few of the selection I've done:

They are so simple but mean you can be a bit more creative with your Christmas Wrapping....and who doesn't love to receive something where a bit of thought had been put into it!

Until tomorrow....bye :)

Love, Hannah x

Blogmas Day 5 | DIY: Christmas Cards

I used to make a few cards when I was really little. I'd go OTT with the glitter and stick so many little bows on that it would be impossible to shut the envelope.

When I went to my Art and Craft Club with the Stroke Association last week, we went all Christmassy and the volunteers had bought in a whole heap of Christmas Card making bits and bobs. I got the bug for going all Crafty again so I went to Hobbycraft and The Range and picked up some really affordable blank cards, and Christmas themed bits.

Rather than going OTT this time I went for the less is more approach and decided simplicity was a bit more sophisticated.

If you want to see more about what I used and what the cards finished up like, keep reading....

What you will need:

It's completely up to you what designs you would like to do on your card.

Here are some that I did:

The pack of Decoupage sheets only cost me a couple of pounds and I was able to make quite a few cards out of one pack. It was a really affordable way to do it. I also bought the pack of 30 cards for about £3 so making my own didn't turn out too expensive in the end.

I'll be back for more blogmas tomorrow :) Hope you're enjoying them :)

Love, Hannah x