Recipes, gift wrapping & free labels – Homemade hot chocolate powder and marshmallow starlets

The christmas preparations are reaching their final stage. After making or buying all the “big” presents, now it’s the turn of the the small ones: a little something for some colleagues, neighbours,… You know what I mean!

This is just the right purpose for a small gift from your kitchen.

I came back to my “little bags of sweetness” – nicely packed homemade hot chocolate powder. But instead of cinammon this time I added some dried and grounded orange zest.

For the packaging I folded little paper bags. They’re really easy to make (as you can see on the pictures). The pattern on the paper (simple copy paper) is printed with this amazing stamp I had used on fabric before. A corresponding black dymo label – that’s it. (One little tip: It sometimes happens that the corners of the bags are not perfectly sealed. You will find out when you fill the bags with the chocolate powder. A little strap of sticky tape solves this problem.)

But this year the chocolate bags got an upgrade: Additional homemade marshmallows with a dash of cinnamon and the shape of stars (cookie cutter)! Vera and her beautiful marshmallow snowflakes brought me to this. I liked the simplicity of the recipe she followed and can fully recommend it (The original recipe can be found here.)

To prevent the marshmallow stars from sticking to each other make sure that they’re thoroughly covered in starch-icing sugar-mixture. Additionally I let them rest for a day before I put them into little bags.

Finally all parts of the gift had to be assembled: One bag of hot chocolate powder and one bag of marshmallow stars went together into a (bigger) kraft paper bag.

Additionally I designed those nice labels/tags. Aren’t they just the icing on the cake?! – And cause I’m a nice person, you can use them as well if you want! Additionally to the German version, I made an English one. You can download them here:

hot chocolate marshmallow label (DE)

hot chocolate marshallow label (EN)

(I recommend to print them on a bit stronger paper/cardstock. I used 180g/m²drawing paper. Make sure that the setting on your printer is on original size. If your printer is able to, print without borders.)

As you can already see, my christmas preparations – parallely – have reached the point where I start to think about this years gift wrapping (Call this obsessed, but every year I go for a certain style of wrapping and then try to follow this theme with all my gifts.): Black & white, gold and kraft paper will be central this christmas!

Have you decided what your gifts will look like this year? What are your favourite little gifts?