Tasteful gifts
From flavour-packed granola to heavenly Hokey Pokey, cook your way into people’s hearts this holiday.
It’s a sweet idea, but handmade gifts for hosts don’t always elicit wide-eyed delight. One might get a polite thank you for the Popsicle-stick trivet or hand-sewn tea cosy, but the recipient’s thinking “meh.”
The one sure route to earning a squeal of delight is to make it yummy. Store-bought yumminess is fine. Whose heart and feet wouldn’t leap at the sight of a box of Thomas Haas chocolates or a bottle of Prosecco?
But something you’ve made — raspberry jam, chocolate bark with candied ginger, lemon poppyseed loaf, homemade dill pickles — contains an extra portion of thoughtfulness and the generosity of time, which depending on your life could be a precious commodity.
My homemade holiday giveaways are cookies. I make enough to give to neighbours, friends, contractors, colleagues and neighbourhood dogs. The garbage and recycling guys, however, are too elusive. I’m racked with guilt unless I make five kinds and that’s not necessarily coming from a place of giving. It’s just a neurosis. I’ve tried to make less and I lose sleep.
I triple or quadruple the batches and freeze them for the holiday onslaught. This year, the lineup is rugelach, dulce de leche macaroons, diablo cookies, ghraybeh (a Middle Eastern “bracelet” cookie) and chocolate-dipped shortbread.
I love the cream cheese in the rugelach dough and the ghraybeh calls for clarified butter, making it light and crisp. The diablo cookies contain a lot of fresh, grated ginger and cayenne and they’re the brainchild of the folks at Tacofino. And dulce de leche macaroons and buttery shortbread seem so right for the diet-sabotaging holiday season.
Each year, I realize I could improve results by not hurtling through the baking process and that I could be more imaginative with packaging than cellophane and ribbon.
I’m already taking my own advice: Instead of bashing out four batches of a recipe in one frenzied go, I’ll assemble the ingredients one evening, mix and chill the dough another evening and then bake them a third evening. The difference is that in my all-fired hurry, I don’t forget to include an ingredient or mistake the salt for sugar. Also, my stand mixer is less likely to start bronco busting and kicking up a flour blizzard if I mix two double batches rather than four batches in one go. (When I have done four batches in one go, I’ve draped a kitchen towel over the mixer to minimize the flour dust storm.)
My sister is a better cookie baker than me and I tell her, “Please, please don’t send any,” because they’re too tempting. As if we need more cookies, right? But every year, some arrive via Canada Post, amazingly fresh and intact, even the meringue mushrooms. But yumminess is everything. Somehow, we manage to eat them all with a little help from friends. Here, we offer you recipes for Hokey Pokey, a honeycomb candy; dark caramel sauce and granola, which we’re sure would not elicit any “mehs.”