The Art of Cookie Gifting Part 1

Chocolate Biscotti, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Mocha Latte Cookies and Spice White Chocolate Cranberry (Speculish) Cookies

I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I’ve given away many hundreds of cookie gifts (toot toot!).  I’ve given cookies to individuals and to groups like doctor’s offices, school administrators, library staff, post office workers … you name it, chances are I’ve given them cookies. Giving to individuals is a bit different than giving to groups and I’ve picked up a few tips to make group-giving easier:

1.  Giving to groups means that they’ll be sharing the cookies – make it easy by giving more, but smaller cookies. Definitely stay away from giant cookies. I like to give more moderately sized cookies anyway around the holidays because people are already indulging and probably just want a small taste of something sweet.

2.  Make everyone feel included. Lots of people work with dietary restrictions. Even if you don’t specifically know about any members of the group that have one, you can pretty much assume that someone does and you don’t want your cookies to make anyone feel excluded.  I try to include at least one “free” cookie in the gift, whether it’s nut free, dairy free, gluten free or vegan. I  wrap those cookies up separately so that the other cookies don’t “contaminate” them. Make sure to label them also. For example, if I’m giving a cookie plate with cranberry almond bars, biscotti, chocolate chip cookies and ginger cookies, I’ll put the nut free ones in separate plastic bags labelled “nut free” and put those bags on top of the other cookies before wrapping up the gift. If you want, you can also include a note with your contact information in case anyone has a question about ingredients.

3.  Variety is the spice of the cookie gift!  Ok, that didn’t come out exactly right, but I do think variety raises the bar on a cookie gift. You can approach this a few different ways. You can have different textures (crunchy, chewy, gooey, crumbly) or different flavors. If I’m making a big cookie gift, I usually want a chocolatey cookie, a fruity cookie, a spice cookie, a nutty cookie, a crunchy cookie and maybe some kind of wild card.  THE EXCEPTION:  If you have one recipe that you know knocks everyone’s socks off, go for it and give them a generous gift of that.  The same applies if you just know how to make one kind of cookie – people will love that you took the time to make a homemade gift.