Gift Idea: Homemade Gift Baskets

As I mentioned in my last blog, a new gift idea I came across this year was homemade gift baskets. These are great because they are personalised, and can be as cheap or as expensive as you want.

Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of the final products before giving them out at Christmas, but these are some ideas that we did...


A "Quiet Night at Home" Gift basket
This gift basket for Mum contained a Michael Bublé CD, a block of Rocky Road Chocolate, and a box of Nestle Drinking Chocolate saches.


A "Brunch" Gift basket
We did this gift basket both for my grandparents & André's mum, but they were a little different. For my grandparents, I included a bottle of pancake mix, a packet of Apple & Berry oats, a serving plate, Christmas tea towel, a tin of mixed berries, two jars of jam (Ginger Marmalade and a mixed berries jam) and two sample boxes of tea (Chamomile and Lemon Honey). For André's mum, I included a bottle of chocolate pancake mix, a bottle of fruit juice, a packet of Apple & Berry oats and two jars of jam.



A "Hot/Chilli" Gift Basket
This one was for André's dad. He loves anything hot and made of chilli. So in his basket, we included a block of dark chilli chocolate, a packet of Wasabi Peas, a tube of Wasabi Paste, a bottle of Nando's Extra Hot Peri-Peri sauce, a bottle of Mustard, Honey & Herbs marinade, a bottle of some type of chilli conserve, and two tubes of seasoning paste (like what you get in the fresh veggies section of the supermarket) - an Indian flavoured one, and a Chilli flavoured one.

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Another slightly different "gift box" I did was for Christine. This one's for the Harry Potter nerds. It was a lot of work but I had a lot of fun doing it and Christine's reaction (squealing, bouncing up and down and clapping) was definitely worth it.

I made her a Honeydukes Sampler Box. Honeydukes is the sweetshop in the village of Hogsmeade in Harry Potter. All the sweets I made or bought are, according to the books, found in Honeydukes (or are sweets mentioned in other parts of Harry Potter that could plausibly be found there). Obviously my sweets did not have the magical properties that some of the fictional varieties had, but they were still a lot of fun.

The box included homemade toffees, peanut toffees ("Cockroach Clusters") and chocolate fudge, store-bought sherbet lemons, gum balls ("Drooble's Best-Blowing Gum"), jelly beans ("Bertie Botts' Every Flavoured Beans"), sherbet UFOs ("Fizzing Whizzbees"), chocolate frogs ("Chocolate Frogs", complete with collector's cards) and "Ice Mice" (mice made from fondant).

I'll expand on this gift box in a separate post, as I found other people's blogs helpful when putting my sample box together, so hopefully I can help someone else out :)