Hot Chocolate Stirring Spoons

Here’s how this post was originally written: It’s almost the end of 2012! Can you believe it! I can’t believe how quickly the year has flown by! The kids only have a few days left of school, so I only have a few days to finish putting together the Christmas presents for their teachers!

Clearly I didn’t find the time to edit photos, and actually create this post until today, but I had a lot of fun putting these together and I think it would be easy to do these as a Valentine’s Day gift for friends or teachers!

On my massive Christmas shopping weekend, I found some adorable hot chocolate canisters at Costco. I picked up three packages and tried to come up with something yummy and homemade to go with them. After perusing my favourite inspirational website  I found the perfect thing! Hot chocolate spoons!

My friend Alana mentioned to me that she used her mini Crockpot to melt the chocolates for her Peanut Butter Balls.

Since I wanted to use more than one type of chocolate, I put a few glass jars into the crockpot, put a couple of inches of water into the pot (being extra careful not to get any water into the jars, it’ll make the chocolate seize up and die) and in 20 minutes, voila! A whole bunch of kinds of chocolate, perfectly melted and ready for dipping!

For my Hot Chocolate Spoons, I gathered up a bunch of ingredients I already had on hand – all I had to buy was the plastic spoons! I used semi-sweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, butterscotch chips and milk chocolate chips. 

For the toppings, I used micro-mini marshmallows like these, Christmas coloured sprinkles, Heath bar chips, and mini chocolate chips.

Once the chocolate was all melty and smooth, I got to dipping! The trick with these babies is to swirl the plastic spoon around in the jar until it’s completely covered, then tap the excess chocolate off of the spoon using the inside of the jar. I had a cookie sheet covered in wax paper to use as the resting plac e for the spoons. Once they were dipped, I would sprinkle them with a little bit of goodness. 

 
My girls liked the look of the white chocolate with Christmas sprinkles and the semi-sweet chips with the micro marshmallows the best! 

I put four of the chocolate spoons into a plastic treat bag, wrapped it with a pretty tie. I put the chocolate spoons with the hot chocolate canister and some super-delicious Toblerone Shortbread and wrapped them up all pretty. I had the girls each write a card to their teachers and they were all ready to go!

It would be so easy to switch these hot chocolate spoons to use them for Valentine's gifts by using hot pink heart shaped sprinkles or even crushed candy canes for red and white color.  I hope you have enjoyed these quick and easy gifts for teachers, neighbours and friends. Sorry that I didn’t get around to posting them until after Christmas!!!

I’m hoping to link this post up to a couple of fun link parties:

A Bowl Full of Lemons

Six Sister's Stuff

Delightful Order

Think Tank Thursday

Valentine’s Baking for the Class

With all of the super cute ideas floating around on Pinterest related to Valentine’s Day, I thought I would get my crafting self in gear and make a super cute Valentine gift for Aidyn and Eila’s classmates.

I started out at my favourite store – Dollarama!!  There I picked up mini cupcake papers, clear plastic drinking cups, Valentine themed treat bags, ribbon and small foam hearts. 

The girls and I baked four dozen mini vanilla cupcakes, and iced them with homemade butter cream icing. 

Then I popped each cupcake into a drinking glass, filled my piping bag with icing and my trusty Wilton 2D tip, and iced, iced, iced.  After all of the cupcakes were sufficiently covered with sugar and sweetness, it was time for more sugar! I sprinkled a healthy dose of Wilton’s red and pink sugar crystals on top of the cupcakes.

This is where the craft gets time consuming. And makes me wonder why I didn’t just buy little boxes of smarties and sign the girls’ names on them.  But alas, I had already started, so I might as well finish off!

I took three rolls of curling ribbon (red, pink and white) and cut and tied in ten inch sections.  I signed each foam heart “Love Aidyn” or “Love Eila,” punched a hole in the heart (with my scissors, at this point I was too tired to go look for my single hole punch), and fed the ribbon through. 

Then I enlisted the hubs to help package the 48 cupcake cups into the treat bags, tied them up with the cute ribbons and hearts and TA DA!  A super cute Valentine’s baking treat for the kids to bring to school on Tuesday.