An easy, quick present idea

I thought I would share with you this present that I ‘made’ for a friend this week. It is quick and easy but I hopefully something that would be appreciated a bit more than a token box of chocolates or similar…

My friend likes to bake, and I had recently pinned these to My Make Do and Mend Presents board on Pinterest. They are from Bakerella and look far more professional than my attempt, as you will see!

I didn’t have all the ingredients needed to follow the instructions on the Bakerella site, and as I was typically doing it last minute, didn’t have time to go and get the necessary bits. So I decided to improvise.

I have a great recipe for Smarties cookies from the BBC Good Food 101 Cakes and Bakes book, and I had all the dry ingredients that it would require. Here is a link to a post I did on my other blog Shouty Cat Makes, with the full recipe. The method involves creaming the butter and sugar and then adding the other bits sequentially, but obviously once all the dry ingredients are in the jar in pretty layers, you can’t really take out just the bits you want, so I had to experiment with doing them as an ‘all-in-one’. (Tough job as it meant we had to eat homemade smartie biscuits…) It worked!

So then I went on the hunt for a jar. We have lots of old jam jars stashed away, but some of them have been used for chutneys, and so smell a bit vinegary, so I steered clear of those! It is harder than you would think to find the right size jar. I found one that I thought would be ok, and put in the flour, and some of the sugar, before realising it was going to be too small. Grrrrrr. On the second attempt it was about right. But by that point my flour and sugar weren’t quite as clearly demarcated as I would have liked. Never mind.

Anyway, into the jar I put:

• 150g self raising flour
• 100g light brown soft sugar
• 1 tube of smarties

You have to pack each layer down well, and I think it would work better it you did it as in the picture above, and had flour and sugar separated by things like oats and raisins-it would look prettier and the layers would stay separate better.

I then made some sticky labels for the top and the side of the jar, and printed off some instructions to stick onto a luggage tag to tie around the top.

Here are the instructions on the tag, and I covered the other side with some old sheet music as my friend is quite musical.

In case you can’t read it, it says: Add 100g softened butter and 1 tbsp golden syrup to contents of jar and blitz in mixer. Spoon tablespoons of dough onto lined baking sheets and bake for 8-12mins at 180C until golden brown. Makes approx 15

And here is the result.

Not quite as pretty as I was hoping for, and the making the labels was a bit time consuming for someone as computer illiterate as me, but I hope it will be appreciated!