Love in a jar...

So this is my new thing lately, apparently.  I've made 3 of these now since moving to NC and I've taken them as hostess gifts. I figure I suck at picking out wine. Any day of the week, I'd go with Arbor Mist, but when you show up at a friend's house with a bottle of Arbor Mist, there isn't a whole lot of excitement. Flowers are super- way better than wine, but here in Jacksonville, we have these crazy little bugs.  I don't know if they're fruit flies or what, but they're tiny little bugs that like to fly up your nose and into your eyes and they multiply like rabbits. We'll just call them bunny bugs. HATE THEM. The owners of this house left a bouquet of fresh flowers and it took us 4 weeks to get rid of the bugs. INSANITY. We had flowers in the house the other day and a few bugs showed up, and I nipped that in the bud real quick. So, yeah, I'm staying away from flowers. This is a great little project that you can make with things you already have (or that I already have) in the house. I've been saving spaghetti sauce jars and cleaning them up really well. GooGone is awesome! Use a q-tip or cotton ball instead of paper towel and goo-gone will remove the inked expiration date on the jar and any yucky residue from the label. Spray paint your lid and you've got a clean slate of a jar ready for filling! 

You'll also need a tamping instrument and a piece of paper or a funnel. I use the tamper provided with my espresso machine that is in fact, actually made for the purpose of squashing and flattening, but you could find something equally effective in the drawers of your kitchen, I'm sure. Whatever recipe you decide to use, you'll most likely need to 1/2 it. The cookies pictured are the white chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookies because I was baking them yesterday, I figured I'd just go with it.  It'll make 2 dozen cookies when prepared. Obviously, you're only using the dry ingredients. That's obvious, right? If you showed up to someone's house and offered them a hostess gift in the form of a jar filled with flour, oats, and RAW EGGS, they might ask you to leave. Anyhow, back to the tamping. Is that a word? I think it is. If it's not, what I mean is the flattening and smushing of the ingredients. You need to tamp really well after you add each ingredient. You can add them in any order, but I always add the baking powder with the flower and the salt with the sugar since they look alike. To get them into the jar without spilling everywhere, use the funnel (I'm not fancy enough to actually own a funnel, thus the paper). And seriously- don't forget to tamp, or your end product ends up looking like this: 

Yeah, it's a mess. It looks like Sweet Pepper had an accident. That's also what happens when you eat raw cookie dough! Don't do it!! Learn from Sweet Pepper! Sad day when your ingredients don't fit in the jar! TAMP, TAMP, TAMP! You can order your ingredients whichever way is more pleasing to you- this recipe called for 1 1/2 cups of oats- by far the greatest of all the ingredients, so I split it, 1/2 on the bottom, 1/2 on top, so it wasn't so "oaty" looking. Here's the earlier version I did, and I waited to add my chocolate chips until the end and you could barely see them! How embarrassing!!! Much cuter with the pretty ingredients in the middle and the oats split  :)  

So yeah, squash it all in there, screw on your lid, tie on a pretty ribbon and don't forget to include the directions- you know, how much butter, eggs, etc to add, how long and how hot to bake... Like this!

That is all. Happy cramming.