Clever, Crafty, Cookin' Mama: Ice Cream - as Gifts!
Just a quick post as we are getting down to holiday crunch time, but I am always on the look out for creative gifts I can give neighbors, coworkers, and teachers. I love to think outside the box and I was thinking especially of what I could give my girls' teachers this year as a Christmas gift. I already had them fill out my free printable survey at the beginning of the year, so I know what they like and don't like. I also talked to a lot of my teacher friends on what they would love to receive, because they tend to get an endless supply of mugs, lotions, and candles. Suddenly it hit me! I can make them homemade quarts of ice cream! What? I was so excited because we have had six months to perfect our recipes, and now it will make a perfect gift!
The nice thing about this is, you can tailor the flavor for the person you are giving it to. Since I knew ahead of time none of the gift receivers were lactose intolerant, I opted to make our family's favorite recipe, that also happened to be the very popular holiday flavor of Pink Peppermint. I just had to go to Cash n' Carry (restaurant supply store) and find empty one-quart paper containers and lids.
After that we use our 2-quart ice cream maker and make a batch of our Pink Peppermint recipe. I scooped one quart into each container while the ice cream was still in the soft stage and let it come to a hard freeze in the paper container.
Our Pink Peppermint ice cream has chunks of smashed candy cane in it, for extra peppermintiness.
Who wouldn't want to open a gift like this?
After that it was just a matter of how I was going to present it. I went and got some ice cream scoops and decided to attach them to the top of the present. It got a little tricky trying to secure it to a round frozen container. Let's just say I used extra tape on the bottom and the top to make sure it would stay.
After that I made a simple card out of card stock. Red card stock as the base and white for the message. I had some old crinkle scissors lying around so I tried to make the edges of the white note fancier. I added the "Thank-you for being such a cool teacher" to the front. I used rubber cement to seal them together.
On the back I added a personalized thank you note and also explained what the gift was, ingredients, etc.
I actually did this late at night so I ended up storing these in the freezer with the scoops, ribbons, and all.
I added the labels last minute in the morning, because I wasn't sure what the rubber cement glue would do in the freezer. After that it was only a race against the clock to get it to school (luckily it was close by) and present it to the teachers so they could get it to a freezer until the end of the day. They seemed very excited about receiving their gifts! By the way if you don't have the ability to make your own ice cream, you could pick up a quart of their favorite flavor and present it the same way. I love it. A little unexpected but very appreciated.