The only all-occasion guide to homemade food gifts that look as fabulous as they taste, with more than 150 recipes, hundreds of packaging ideas, and insider tips from best-selling author and food stylist Elle Simone Scott Food fosters connection, and there's no more meaningful way to connect with others than to give a personalized food gift that you’ve prepared and packaged yourself. Elle Simone Scott, food stylist, ATK cast member, and author of the bestseller Boards, turns her considerable talents to expanding the boundaries of what food gifts are (they're endlessly customizable) and when they can be given (literally, anytime), proving along the way that food is one of the best (and best-looking) gifts you can give. Gifts for every occasion: A unique housewarming or new neighbor gift, celebrating a wedding or a new baby, a birthday, graduation, holiday cookie swap, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day—all these and more are covered. Any level gift, from simple to spectacular: Give one gorgeous bottle of Fruits of the Forest Liqueur. Up the ante by adding a jar of Citrus Simple Syrup. Gift a cocktail party basket with the liqueur, syrup, sparkling wine, flute glasses, and a cocktail recipe. Spin one item many ways: Make a big batch of homemade granola for gifting, or divide the recipe into thirds and flavor them different ways. Elle shows how to do this with shortbread cookies, hot cocoa mix, party snack mix, and more. Big-batch gifts: Bring Banana Caramel Pie in a Jar or Party Cake Pops to a school or work event. Gift your whole crowd at the holidays with Chocolate-Ginger Truffles or get them through the winter with Summer Tomato Sauce. Playful DIY meal kits: For friends who love to cook, there's DIY Pancake Mix, Turkish Bride Soup in a Jar, or Mushroom Risotto in a Jar. Helping-hand gifts: Support and comfort someone with a fully cooked meal that’s ready to be popped into freezer or oven—think Chicken Ramen Soup or Stuffed Shells with Amatriciana Sauce. You’ll also learn Elle’s favorite ideas for keeping food gifts fresh and packaging items cost-effectively yet creatively using edible garnishes, thrifted tableware, canning jars, cellophane bags, parchment, and more. With her expert help, you’ll never again resort to an expensive, impersonal store-bought basket.

Choose from over 100 recipes for homemade baked goods, preserves & other edible vegan gifts that will impress. Feel good about giving eco-conscious yet delicious gifts.

Features one hundred simple-to-make edible gifts from flavored butters and pickles to infused salts and desserts.

Gifts are always with us: we use them positively to display affection and show gratitude for favours; we suspect that others give and accept them as douceurs and bribes. The gift also performed these roles in early modern English culture: and assumed a more significant role because networks of informal support and patronage were central to social and political behaviour. Favours, and their proper acknowledgement, were preoccupations of the age of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Hobbes. As in modern society, giving and receiving was complex and full of the potential for social damage. 'Almost nothing', men of the Renaissance learned from that great classical guide to morality, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 'is more disgraceful than the fact that we do not know how either to give or receive benefits'. The Power of Gifts is about those gifts and benefits - what they were, and how they were offered and received in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows that the mode of giving, as well as what was given, was crucial to social bonding and political success. The volume moves from a general consideration of the nature of the gift to an exploration of the politics of giving. In the latter chapters some of the well-known rituals of English court life - the New Year ceremony, royal progresses, diplomatic missions - are viewed through the prism of gift-exchange. Gifts to monarchs or their ministers could focus attention on the donor, those from the crown could offer some assurance of favour. These fundamentals remained the same throughout the century and a half before the Civil War, but the attitude of individual monarchs altered specific behaviour. Elizabeth expected to be wooed with gifts and dispensed benefits largely for service rendered, James I modelled giving as the largesse of the Renaissance prince, Charles I's gift-exchanges focused on the art collecting of his coterie. And always in both politics and the law courts there was the danger that gifts would be corroded, morphing from acceptable behaviour into bribes and corruption. The Power of Gifts explores prescriptive literature, pamphlets, correspondence, legal cases and financial records, to illuminate social attitudes and behaviour through a rich series of examples and case-studies.

Germany, spring 1945. Hitler is dead and his armies crushed. Across the conquered Reich, cities lie devastated by Allied saturation bombing; their traumatised populations, exhausted and embittered by defeat, face a future of acute privation and hardship. Such was the broken state of the nation in which a British civilian and military force arrived in the spring and summer of 1945. Their zone of occupation was the northern and northwestern part of Germany, the country's former industrial heartland. Their task? To build democracy from the ruins of Hitler's Reich, and, having defeated Nazism on the battlefield, to 'win the peace' by eradicating Nazism from German hearts and minds. As well as offering a vivid narrative of the British occupation in political and military terms, from the Potsdam Conference to the Berlin Airlift, Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans explores the day-to-day experiences of the ordinary Britons who worked for the Control Commission for Germany between 1945 and 1949. Some reconstructed bridges and schools, supervised the destruction of military matériel and brought fugitive Nazis to justice; while others became entangled in black marketeering, corruption and sexual scandal. In time, they would find themselves on the front line of the Cold War, as irreconcilable tensions divided Europe between East and West.