This week is Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughter’s school. Monday, everyone brought flowers for the teachers to put together into a flower arrangement, so we picked out some flowers over the weekend for Andrea to bring in. Today, students were asked to bring in a snack or sweet treat for their teachers. I talked to Andrea and she wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for her teachers. I suggested we put them in some Ball jars. We went to made a double batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (BEST-EVER Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies). They really are the best-ever chocolate chip cookies, and definitely chewy, which I love.
I bought a cookie scoop to use for the first time ever, and I *loved* it. I will never go back to scooping cookie dough with a spoon. The scoop I bought is slightly larger than the standard size I think – it holds about 1 1/2 tablespoons. It was sold as a “small” scoop at my grocery store, but from what I can tell, the standard size for a cookie scoop is 1 tablespoon. As a result, my cookies were a little bigger than the original recipe, but perfectly round and pretty consistent in size between the cookies. I overfilled the scoop in the first couple of batches, so those cookies were a bit bigger, but I found out they were slightly too big to fit even in the wide-mouth Ball jars I bought. I was able to fix that by just barely filling the cookie scoop for the remainder of the batches, and those cookies fit just fine in the jars.
I used two different types of chocolate chips – Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and Nestle milk chocolate chips. I’ve used Nestle semi-sweet before, but I thought they were too sweet for the recipe, so I was curious how the other types would taste. I definitely preferred the taste of bittersweet chocolate chips that the recipe calls for, even though I’m not normally a fan of bittersweet chocolate, it seemed to match the cookie best. The only downside was that the Ghirardelli chips were a little wider and flatter than the Nestle chips, so the cookies with the Nestle chips turned out a little prettier with beautiful lumps from the chocolate chips.
Here are picture of a few of the cookies so you can see how beautiful they were and the difference made by the two different shaped chocolate chips. (The two lumpier ones in the front are the Nestle ones, and the two in the back are the Ghirardelli ones.)
For the jars, I traced the flat metal lid on white cardstock, and then had Andrea draw a picture for each of her teachers and write her name on each one. Then I cut them out and glued them on to the lids. (TIP: I found I needed to cut out a smaller circle of cardboard to glue between the lid and the cardstock to fill the gap from the raised edge on the lid.) I made little labels for the each jar that had the teacher’s name and said, “Thanks for making me one smart ‘cookie’!” I designed the labels in Microsoft Word, printed them on cardstock, and then cut out and hole punched the tags. Then I tied the tags on with some cute ribbon I picked up in the Target Dollar Spot a while back.
And here’s the final result! Andrea was so excited to bring them in to school this morning.
I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!
Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!
What a super cute idea. I have trouble pre-planning anything and always do things last minute.
I love that Andrea decorated the top of the lid for each of them 😀
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Who ever said this wasn’t last minute? 😉 I’ve had the Teacher Appreciation week activities on the calendar for at least a week, and finally I remembered on the way home from school yesterday to ask Andrea what she wanted to do for her teachers. I never considered she’d want to bake something that I’d have to figure out how to package. We spent a lot more time thinking about the flowers for Monday and the picture for Wednesday in advance for some reason, even though those are the things that require hardly any pre-planning.
What a cute idea! I love how it’s packaged. Any teacher would be thrilled to receive that. 🙂
Nessa The Procrastinator recently posted…I’ve got quilts on the brain!
Cute!!! Love the packaging idea and can’t wait to try a new chocolate chip cookie recipe. Love super chewy chocolate chip cookies….they are my downfall!
Thank you! The cookies are soooo good. I’ve made them a few times now, but this time I figured it out. Leaving them on the cookie sheet for several minutes after you take them out of the oven is key.
what an awesome idea and who doesn’t love cookies?!?! These are perfect – thank you!
Thanks! I’m glad you liked the idea. The teachers LOVED them!
BTW, I checked out your site — you have some great photos. I’m just starting up a photography business myself. I’m hoping to launch my web site and FB page soon – just pulling together a portfolio now.
This is such a great idea. And I love that it doesn’t cost a lot of money or take a lot of time. Thanks I’m going to make these right now.
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Thanks for stopping by! We had such fun making the cookies and I thought the jars were a fun way to gift them. And my daughter loved drawing the pictures for the lid!