Friday, November 11, 2011

Baking Party - Cookie Kits & Recipe Books

We don't usually hand out pre-packed goodie bags at our parties because we like the guests to collect stuff in theirs all through the day. This time, though, we made two takeaways for each family that was represented in our guest list.

The first was a recipe book of Jenna's favorite cookies, with a foreword by Jenna. These are the actual recipes we use at home, typed out and printed on the brightest and most colorful paper we could find. To make it more fun for Jenna, she and I took our original templates to the nearest print shop, where she got to look at the huge color-sample book and pick out the colors she wanted. We printed out the different pages with Jenna helping to load the copier and count the sheets of paper and then went home to cut and sew them up. 

Jenna sat outside on our deck folding the little books and admiring the colors. 

The second takeaway was a cookie kit. 

We could easily have put the cookie mix in a jar, but I didn't have jars. So we divided big plastic bags into sections and sewed the sections apart. We printed out labels with the instructions behind them, to finish of the kit. 

To keep the ingredients from oozing out while sewing, we employed a little simple Physics trick-

a pair of strip magnets kept each section clamped tightly shut so we could sew across the bags. 

And because we knew that little kids might be helping their parents at home to bake these cookies, we labeled the sections A, B and C to help with the instructions. Simple!  


  1. Neat! I bet the other moms feel quite inferior when they invite your girls to their kids' parties. ;)

  2. Great idea, I did a similar thing for my eldests 6th birthday but I ended up with a bag of flour, sugar & raisins all mixed up, would have looked much cooler if I'd divided them up like that!

  3. LiEr, every time I read one of your blog posts I just sigh deeply with how lovely everything always is. I swear you must operate on about 3 hours sleep a night when it's one of the girl's birthdays. LOL I know what it's like. I've got a combined pirate party to organise for Sunday week for my daughter & son. I convinced them to have a combined party this year. Last year it was Barbie Princess one week and a fortnight later Toy Story 'car' birthday. That's what happens when you've got a daughter and a son. Wish me luck!

    Anne x

  4. @Grandma G my thoughts exactly! I would be one of those moms ;)

  5. I would LOVE to know the recipes you used (and how you broke them down into smaller bits) - I am the faculty advisor for my school's baking club, and I'd like to do something like this so we can "meet" and have a real-time virtual bake during this pandemic.

    1. Kristen, did you mean the recipe for the cookie lit? I believe at the time our go-to recipe was the Nestle Tollhouse one. Since then, we've added more CCC to our repertoire but they're pretty much variations of the standard CCC recipe. Id say any recipe will work. We broke the ingredients down into A: brown and white sugars, B: flour, baking soda, salt, C: chocolate chips. The baker provides the butter and eggs (and vanilla extract, if they want it). Happy baking!

