I love easy and delicious gifts at the holidays.  I always try to find a new one that I can give to neighbors and to the hosts of parties I attend.  This year, I decided on chocolate-filled cookie cutters.  These are crazy easy to make and are two gifts in one.  First, you get to eat the yummy chocolate inside and then you can use the cookie cutter to make cookies, or as a decoration on your tree if you are not inclined to bake.  Let me show you how I made one of them.

First, select a nice cookie cutter.  I chose a snowflake cookie cutter that is on the large side.  I think it looks better as a gift than the smaller ones would.  However, if you want to make these to give out as favors to your child’s friends, buy a tub of the plastic ones and fill away.  Next, I chose to tie a ribbon around my cookie cutter.  This is not a necessary step but I think it looks nice.  Once that is all ready, simply place your cutter on a sheet of parchment paper or wax paper on top of a plate.  Now, we are ready for the chocolate!

I like to use Ghirardelli chocolate for all of my candy making. It melts well and it tastes great. All I did was place some chunks in a bowl and zap it in the microwave. If you are doing a lot of them at once, you should probably use the double-boiler method for melting the chocolate. Mmm… I had to resist the temptation to just eat it off the spoon!

Now, spoon your chocolate into the cutter. Don’t worry if it starts to ooze out the bottom a little, because those bits will easily snap off after it is cool. I filled mine most of the way up with chocolate but not completely full so it wouldn’t accidentally run over the top.

For this particular cookie cutter, I want to add a little something extra.  The recipient of this gift happens to love chocolate with peanuts. So, I took some regular peanuts and chopped them up with my handy-dandy food chopper. (I love that thing! Especially for mincing onions but I digress and KitchenAid isn’t even paying for this endorsement!) I spread my chopped nuts over top of the still melted chocolate and pressed them down a bit with a butter knife.

Well, the hard part is over folks. Now it is time for the waiting.  You can either wait a long time and leave it on your counter to cool or you can be impatient like me and pop it into your freezer.  I think there is some chocolate-making reasoning that says you should let it cool slowly but again, I have no patience!

Do you see the frozen rolls in the back of my freezer?  I bought those to make Pioneer Woman’s Rosemary rolls that I have heard such wonderful things about.  I can’t wait to try them out.

Once your chocolate is hard, you are finished! Well, of course, you can remove the chocolate that oozed out the bottom. Simply snap it away and I highly suggest eating those bits and pieces yourself. I mean, you want to make sure it tastes good before giving this as a gift to someone, right?

These would make great hostess gifts, teacher gifts, kid and neighbor presents. Of course, if you don’t know the person really well, I would steer clear of peanuts in case of allergies. I think these would be really pretty with a silver candy cane cookie cutter, white chocolate and crumbled up candy canes sprinkled on top. Or you could make a s’mores version (my favorite dessert) that has mini marshmallows on top and crumbled up graham cracker on the bottom.