So if you started with my article on individually wrapping cookies, you’ll know it’s heavily focused on the technical requirements of packaging and increasing shelf life.
In this article, I’m looking at the warm and fuzzy side of cookie wrapping. The fun stuff. Wrapping for birthdays and Christmas, especially at home where you don’t normally find a semi-automated L-sealer with a line feed bagging system. Unless you’re in my house, but even I don’t find that normal.
Homemade Wrapping for Christmas
I’m starting with Christmas because it’s the easiest. There are tons of ways to wrap your cookies, but the two things to bear in mind are “food safe” and “beautiful.”
Food safe is the easy part. Put your cookies in a glass jar, a biscuit tin or a food bag and your cookies are safe and ready for boxing or labelling.
Glass Jars
Jam jars make great cookie containers. They’re easy to clean and seal. Pop a handmade gift tag on some string and you have a beautiful handmade gift, ready for giving. If you’re making cookies with kids, they can decorate the outside of the jar with glue and glitter, paint or stickers, making it a unique gift with their personal touch.
You can also buy fancier glass jars, which become part of the gift itself.
Biscuit Tins
A traditional favourite and great for giving out loads of cookies. Just be sure to fill the tin or any shaking or bumping and they’ll be reduced to crumbs. Blank tins are available from Amazon and bulk suppliers but there’s nothing wrong with reusing a supermarket tin. You can also buy a biscuit storage tin, the sort you leave on display to keep the cookies in reach for quick snacking. Just make sure it’s a tin and not a plastic tub. It’s easy to reuse a chocolate sweet tub, but they aren’t necessarily food safe, especially if the chocolates inside were individually wrapped.
Quick and Easy Cookie Wrapping
One of my favourite way to give cookies, is in a poster tube, and not just in the mail. They’re low cost to post and it will brighten anyone’s day to receive a mystery tube, that turns out to be full of delicious cookies. Just be sure you make cookies that fit inside!
Pop your cookies in a cellophane bag and tie. Then slide the bag inside the tube.
Tubes typically come in 50mm, 76mm and 100mm, but you can easily cut them to length and buy packs of extra ends. If you can get white tubes, you can decorate them with Christmas washi tape or draw on them and colour them in.
Alternatively go for black or brown and add a sticky label with your own decoration and any ingredients you want to highlight (like nuts or gluten).
Cupcake Boxes
It might sound quirky, but I founded an entire biscuit business selling cookies in cupcake boxes. I could buy labels that fitted an A4 sheet lengthwise and wrap them around the cupcake box from top to bottom, showing off my logo, my label and my ingredients. On the other side the window let buyers see the cookies. Commercially there are downsides but for gifts, they’re a quick and cute way to turn a stack of cookies into a neat little gift.
