Craft Anyway!: Homemade Cocoa Basket and Spiral Cookies

First, I will apologize for the length of this post. It's pretty lengthy, but totally worth it, I swear.

My little K-ster takes ballet and tap lessons at one of the local dance studios. So I had to put together a cute little Christmas gift for her ballet teacher and her assistant.

Enter the Homemade Coca Basket...

Everything in this basket (minus the basket and paper filler) was handmade in some way. It was actually one of my favorite gifts to make.

I got the idea for monogramming the mug from Design Mom. I just picked up the white mug at Walmart on clearance and the Porcelaine 150 paint pen from Micheal's. These pens are super cool, and I plan on buying them in all sorts of colors and decorating anything possible.

To transfer the image I wanted to paint onto the mug, I just rubbed pencil on the back of my template, taped it to the mug, and then traced over the letter with a ballpoint pen. When I removed the template, a nice, visible outline remained on the mug. Then I used the paint marker to trace the letter and sketch it in. The paint has to dry for at least 24 hours before being baked. Once baked, the mugs looked like this...

To make the mocha cocoa mix and the mini-marshmallows I used Willow's recipes over at Will Cook For Friends. (She made her marshmallows into cute little ghosts for Halloween...make sure you check them out!)

After I blended up the cocoa mix, I put it in this jar with a cute ribbon and tag that I made on Picnik.

To make cute little mini-marshmallows, I placed the warm, marshmallow "batter" into a piping bag fit with a star tip and piped out what seemed like a million little star shaped marshmallows.

If you decide to do the same thing, I would recommend making half a batch of the "batter" at a time, because I could only fit about half into the piping bag. By the time I finished piping that much, the rest of the "batter" had already hardened in the mixing bowl. Oops.

So once the marshmallows had set and been dusted with sugar, they went into their own jar with a matching tag.

Put everything together in a basket with red, festive paper filler and this message tag...

And voila...a wonderful homemade gift!

Here's the K-ster with her teacher, Stephanie at the party.

But, wait, that's not all!
(I told you this was a long post!)

They also had a Christmas party during their last class before holiday break. I had just come across these adorable and fun spiral cookies on Pinterest from Sprinkle Bakes.

These were seriously so much easier than I thought they were going to be. And the recipe is so versatile. You can chance up the colors of the dough and/or sprinkles for different events and holidays and you can use any flavor extract you like.