Sugar Sugar

I’d been going back and forth about what to get my boyfriend’s family for Christmas. At first my stance was: I don’t need to get them anything. But Christmas isn’t about “needing” to give gifts, am I right?! So I decided to put together homemade sweets gift baskets (1 for his parents/siblings living at home and 1 for his brother/his family).

I had the gift idea, but I still needed to decide what sweets to make. I’ve seen hundreds of delicious ideas on blogs and Pinterest lately. But as soon as I saw Jen’s dipped pretzels and knew I had to make those!

I wanted to make 2 different kinds – a dozen of each. And guess how many unbroken pretzel rods were in my bag? 24 exactly! WINNING!

If you want step by step directions, check out Jen’s tutorial. I did everything the same except I didn’t add oil to my candy melts.

One dozen M&M dipped pretzels

One dozen candy cane-striped dipped pretzels

(I wanted to do red and green, but Wal-Mart didn’t have green candy melts)

I packaged them in cellophane treat bags that I bought at the Dollar Tree 5+ years ago (but you can also find them at Wal-Mart).

One sweet treat done!

My next idea came from my Christmas gift for my grandpa and his wife. I ordered them a gift basket from Harry & David. It came with a delicious looking Moose Munch. So I searched ‘Moose Munch’ on Pinterest and found this tutorial. I topped mine with crushed semi-sweet chocolate chips and a white chocolate drizzle.

Seriously, this is so good I could eat the batch in one sitting!

I bagged my Moose Munch in ziploc bags to keep it fresh.

But of course I couldn’t leave them like that. I folded and stapled a scrap piece of scrapbook paper to each bag so they’d look more festive.

One more sweet treat done!

And of course I had to include my peppermint bark! My recipe can be found here as part of Type A’s 25 Days of ~~Christmas~~ Guest Bloggers.

Oh, and I couldn't forget the furry family members. I made these for Molly (our family dog) last Christmas and she loved them. I had already made a batch for Molly and Ringo this Christmas, so I just packaged a few of those up.

OK, so maybe I should have called these homemade sweets gift bags instead of gift baskets. I found these gift bags in my stash and of course I already had white tissue paper.

All bagged up and ready to gift!