DIY Advent Calendar

It’s November and it’s the start of our holiday blogs leading up to Christmas. We’re doing crafts, gifts, and foods that are inspired by one of our Christmas cards.

The first card is our four little Christmas trees card.

We’re going to share with you how to make an advent calendar. Big advent calendars with little treats/themes are so interesting to me. I’ve seen ones with nail polish, socks, jams etc. that you can buy and I’ve seen people make up personalized ones for people in their lives. My mom made one for me leading up to my Birthday (since my birthday is on the 26^th it worked perfect) but doing the same for a friend or loved one is something that I find so neat.

The advent calendar that we are choosing to show you how to make is really simple and can be made with simple items that you can find in your home.

You will need 25 toilet paper rolls, green, brown, and yellow paint and tissue paper, a glue stick, a metallic felt pen, and little gifts.

Once you have enough toilet paper rolls, paint one of them yellow, three of them brown, and the remaining of them green.

While they are drying, cut your tissue paper. You want to make sure that the tissue is slightly longer than the roll and has enough to go around the roll with a little flap to overlap. Cut two pieces per roll and then also cut two pieces to cover the tops, a big enough rectangle to go around the ends.

Once the rolls have dried start the long process of gluing the tissue paper over the rolls and the tops. Leave an opening at one of the ends so that you can put your gift inside. We covered one of the ends first and then rolled rest afterwards to cover up the scraggly ends. If you want to reuse this calendar then don’t glue the end piece. Glue the body of the roll and then use the green tissue to cover the end by attaching it with an elastic band or green thin ribbon.

When choosing gifts be creative and try to personalize it a bit for the person who is going to open it. You can pick candy, chocolate, jewellery, money, stationary, nail polish, lip balm, key chains, or anything that would fit or that you can make fit into the rolls. If you want to make a bigger calendar than use things like Pringles cans or mailing tubes and do the same process.

Now it’s assembling time. Glue your rolls together to form a tree with a stump and star on top.

Place all of your gifts inside the rolls. For the backing, we’ve picked a piece of white poster paper because that’s what we had but if you’re going to reuse this then you can get a heavier duty cardstock or cardboard in green to match the tree. Glue the backing on.

Once you have the backing on, then all you have left to do is to write the numbers on the tree. We are using a metallic pen to write a mix of numbers and words in random order. You can do your numbering however you like though.

Here is your finished advent Christmas tree calendar.

Easy Butter Cookies

Sadly we’ve come to the last cookie blog post. This week we’re keeping it simple and going with a basic butter cookie. They’re really simple cookies. You can pair them with a nice cup of coffee or tea.

Butter Cookies:

To make these cookies you will need...

2 ½ cups of flour

1 tsp. salt

1 cup of butter

2/3 cup of sugar

1 egg plus 1 egg yolk

1 tsp. of vanilla

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Mix your dry ingredients together in a bowl.

Next use your mixer and beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Then add in the egg and then the vanilla.

Add in the flour gradually until all incorporated. Chill the dough for about 10 minutes so that it’s easier to work with.

In a small bowl place your yolk and whisk it with a teaspoon of water.

Take the dough out of the fridge and roll into small balls. Place the balls on the cookies sheets and lightly pat down and score with a fork.

Brush the yolk over the tops of the cookies and bake for 10 minutes.

Cool completely before serving.

Flourless Chocolate Cookies

Happy Thursday! We’ve almost made it to the end of the week and what better way to celebrate than some fudgy flourless cookies. We went with the “healthy” veggie cookies last week, and this week we are going flourless and super chocolatey. These cookies are so ooey and gooey and yummy. The egg whites in these cookies almost make them seem like gooey chocolate meringues. These cookies don’t last long at all, once they’re baked and in the fridge. Grab the following ingredients and get ready to bake!

*When I bake these, I usually double the recipe; that’s how popular they are!

2 ½ cups icing sugar

¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

¼ tsp. salt

4 egg whites

½ tsp. vanilla

1 ½ cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips

All you need is one bowl to make these cookies.

Add the icing sugar, cocoa powder, and salt to the bowl and stir it up.

Separate 4 eggs and add the whites to the dry mixture along with the vanilla and stir until mixed well.

Lastly add in and stir the chocolate chips.

Line a couple of cookies sheets with parchment paper. This is a really important step when making these cookies because they can get sticky.

The batter is quite runny; this is normal. I used a teaspoon to scoop the batter onto the cookie sheet. It may look like a little spot on the sheet but these cookies spread out so much; they get huge while baking so all you need is a small amount of batter. I found this out the hard way when I scooped about a tablespoon and they doubled and ran together in the oven.

Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes.

When they come out, allowed them to cool for a few minutes on the sheet and then carefully scrape them off to cool a bit more on cooling racks. You can eat them at room temperature or put them in the fridge to get cool. This is what my family likes. They don’t get hard, they stay gooey and are so delicious when nice and cold.