Homemade Christmas Food Gifts, and the Three Things Worth Buying Instead

By Jodie Smith, Product & Hamper Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

Three homemade Christmas food gifts are worth the time: spiced nuts, a quick tomato relish and shortbread. All three are cheap, forgiving, and better fresh than bought. Three are not: pastry cases, marshmallow and gingerbread houses, which take a full day, need equipment you own for one weekend a year, and do not pay you back for the trouble.

Worth drawing that line before you commit a Saturday, because a homemade gift that goes wrong still costs you the day. Here is the honest split, from a business that sells food and has good reason to know which jobs are worth doing at home. If the Saturday is not available, our gift packs land in the same bracket as a good homemade jar.

Make it or buy it, at a glance

The three worth making

Spiced nuts

The best return on effort in the list. Toss 400g of mixed nuts with two tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon of chopped rosemary, a teaspoon of sea salt flakes and two teaspoons of brown sugar. One tray, 160°C, 15 to 20 minutes, stirred once. They come out soft and crisp as they cool, which is the step most people panic about. Cool them completely before they go near a jar, or the salt draws moisture and by Boxing Day you have a damp jar of disappointment. Sealed, they keep about three weeks. Swap the rosemary for fennel seed and chilli and one method gives two gifts. Not making them: Mr Filbert's French Rosemary Almonds are the same idea done well, $9.95 for 100g.

A tomato relish

Relish is the one preserve that suits a December deadline. It cooks hard for under an hour and tastes like itself within a fortnight, where a proper chutney wants months in the cupboard before the spice settles. Start a chutney in the first week of December and you are giving away something unfinished. Our old-fashioned tomato relish is the version we make, and it scales to eight jars without extra work. Use one jar size across the batch so the labels line up. For anyone who would rather buy the jar, the chutneys and relishes we range cover the same ground, and the 110g minis from The Regimental Condiment Company at $6.95 are the right size for a Kris Kringle.

Shortbread

Butter, sugar, flour. Nowhere for a bad ingredient to hide, which is why it is worth making with butter you would happily eat on toast. Keep the butter cool, stop mixing the moment it comes together, bake it low so it dries rather than browns. It keeps a fortnight in a tin and posts better than any other biscuit. The one thing it cannot do is arrive in a keepsake tin, which is half of why the bought version gets given: our biscuits shelf runs Australian-made butter shortbread from $7.95, with illustrated tins at $19.95.

The three not worth the Saturday

Pastry cases

The clearest example on the list. Making twenty-four tiny tart shells means mixing pastry, resting it, rolling it thin, lining tins, chilling again, docking, blind baking with weights, then watching a third of them shrink down the sides. Two hours for something nobody tastes separately from its filling. A box of twelve Confiletas mini sweet pastry cases is $9.95 for shells 40mm across, and the savoury version at 37mm does the same job for anything with cheese in it. They are one of the quietest, steadiest things we sell through December, because people worked out this is the step to skip. Fill them on the morning, never the night before, or the bases go soft. Our guide to Confiletas pastry cases covers what to put in them.

Marshmallow

Homemade marshmallow is genuinely better than bought, and it is still the wrong project. Sugar syrup taken to 118°C, so a thermometer. Ten minutes in a stand mixer. Bloomed gelatine, an oiled knife, a dusted tray. On a humid Australian afternoon it stays tacky whatever you do. If you own the mixer and the day is dry, enjoy yourself. Otherwise the Sweet Dreams Confectionery Co. pouches on our confectionery shelf do the job for about $13.

Gingerbread houses

Baking your own panels sounds charming until the walls come out with a curve in them and the roof will not sit. The Gingerbread Folk traditional house kit is $49.99 and holds four walls, a roof, a chimney, a baseboard, royal icing mix and a piping bag. It is egg-free, which matters when other people's children are decorating it, and stands about 16cm assembled. Construction is the boring part. Decorating is the part anyone actually wants.

Panforte and nougat sit in the same bracket. We stock neither, so this is not us selling you something: an Italian deli is the right place for both.

Making it look like a present

The gap between a jar of relish and a gift is ten minutes of presentation, most of it consistency. One jar size across the batch. One label style, handwritten, contents and date. Brown paper under the lid, tied once, nothing that has to be untied to see what it is.

The best-received version is almost always a pair: one thing you made and one thing you did not. Your relish with a tube of shortbread reads as generous rather than thrifty, and it fixes the problem of a lone small jar looking like an afterthought. Two 110g condiment minis and a shortbread tube sit under $30, where most Kris Kringles land. The jams and spreads shelf is usually where the sweet half comes from, and shipping is free Australia-wide once an order passes $100.

Posting edible gifts around Australia

Dry things travel. Sealed jars, biscuits in tins, nuts in a jar with a lid that screws down properly. Chocolate does not survive a delivery van in an Australian December, and anything needing refrigeration is a hand-delivered gift rather than a posted one. Double-wrap glass and pad the lid so it cannot work loose. List the ingredients on the label too: nuts, gluten, dairy and egg all turn up in homemade gifts, and your jar may be passed to someone at the table who needs to know. If you are ordering components from us, an order placed before 12pm on a weekday leaves our packing room in Corio that day. That is dispatch rather than delivery, so give a December parcel time to travel.

Questions we get asked

What homemade food gifts can I make for Christmas?

Spiced nuts, a vinegar-based relish and shortbread are the three that reward the effort. All three keep for weeks, travel without refrigeration, and cost less to make in quantity than to buy. Rocky road and fudge are worth adding if there are children helping. Skip anything needing a sugar thermometer, a stand mixer, or assembly on the day it is given.

How long do homemade edible gifts keep?

Spiced nuts keep about three weeks in a sealed jar, shortbread a fortnight in a tin, and a hot-sealed relish a year unopened, then roughly a month in the fridge once it is opened. Write the make date on the label rather than a use-by, and say plainly whether it wants the fridge. Anything with cream or fresh fruit in it is a two-day gift.

What edible gifts can I post interstate?

Sealed jars, tinned biscuits and anything dry post well. Chocolate and anything needing refrigeration do not, at least not in December. Double-wrap the glass and pad the lid. Australia Post confirms its Christmas cutoff dates in October; until then treat mid-December as the limit for interstate parcels, and send earlier again to WA, the Northern Territory and rural addresses.

Make one thing, buy the rest

That is what most people do once they have tried the alternative, and it is not a compromise. Our gift packs are built for it: a boxed set to carry the gift, with your jar of relish beside it. For a longer list, our Christmas hamper ideas covers what to put together for whom, and the Christmas hampers range is the version where somebody else does the packing.