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The aroma of fresh baked cookies brings back many fond memories. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to box up that aroma and send it as a gift? Here are some cookie gift ideas that will allow you to send the aroma with the cookies. The good news is that you will not even have to fire up your own oven.

Gift cookie jars are containers that contain all the dry ingredients for your own favorite recipe in a canning or other jar. A thirty-two ounce jar is the correct size for most of the recipes.

You will want a recipe that has a total dry ingredient volume of about four cups. You can ignore the volume of the ingredients such as baking soda, salt or spices. If the recipe does not quite add up to four cups, but includes brown sugar, add the brown sugar last. It can be packed and form a plug that keeps the other layers in place until the gift is opened.

The best recipes for this type of gift cookies have ingredients that are of various colors. Sugar cookies do not work well since all the ingredients are white. Chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies are good examples.

Ingredients should be layered carefully into the jar without mixing. You want the differing layers to be visible through the jar. A chopstick can be used to make interesting patterns along the jar by causing valleys and ridges.

Salt and spices can be added at the top of the jar or can even form a very thin layer in the middle of the mix.

Once all the dry ingredients are in the jar, put a new canning lid on the jar. A colorful square of cloth can be placed over the lid and held in place with the canning ring. A coordinating ribbon or raffia can be used to hold a card listing the remaining ingredients that will need to be added and directions for baking.

Since a canning jar is essentially air tight, the dry ingredients will remain fresh for several months. You may wish to make these gifts ahead of time and store in a cool place to send at the appropriate time. These make great gifts to send home with an unexpected guest.

Hey, since you do have those ingredients out, you could choose to bake up a fresh batch of cookies for your family. As you have looked through your recipes for cookie gift ideas, you may have been reminded of one recipe you haven’t cooked in quite a while or found a new recipe for the family to try.

Cookie’s make wonderful gift’s even for the hard-to-get person. Visit my Cookie Gift blog for more cookie gift ideas and inspiration. Also see what we recommend for birthday cookie gift baskets. You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.