53 Delicious Food Christmas Gift Ideas to Send

While there may be millions of packaged granolas at your local supermarket, making granola from scratch is a real game changer.

Your loved one will feel the love for their morning meal with this delicious and nutritious homemade granola recipe, full of whole, all-natural ingredients.

I especially enjoyed the combination of coconut flakes, almond butter, dried cranberries, and maple syrup. 

This is a fun recipe to make as a family for stocking stuffer food Christmas gifts.

Reindeer Food is a sweet trail mix that many of us know as Puppy Chow. However, this recipe adds a bit of Christmas cheer with the addition of red and green M&Ms. 

The salty pretzels and Chex cereal get a thick coating of melted chocolate and creamy peanut butter with a coating of powdered sugar to seal it all. 

Candied nuts are a gourmet delicacy that combines gooey caramelized sugar with crunchy, buttery nuts.

This recipe is surprisingly easy, with only a handful of ingredients. 

Instead of having to sugar over the stove, running the risk of burning it, this recipe has you combine the pecans with egg white and water before receiving a sugar and cinnamon coating that caramelizes in the oven.

You can add in any of your favorite types of nuts.

Salted caramels invoke a flood of nostalgia for Grandma’s candy bowl.

This recipe puts a modern twist on the caramels of old by adding salt to bring out the burnt sugar and buttery taste.

This recipe is quite challenging, requiring exact temperatures and timing.

The result is worth the effort, yielding a rich and creamy caramel chew with a hint of grainy salt to complement both flavor and texture.

Jewish folk may not celebrate Christmas, but they can inspire a wonderful food Christmas gift with this wonderful pastry.

One of the national dishes of Israel and a popular dessert for Jewish holidays, rugelach are crescent-shaped pastries stuffed with cinnamon, sugar, nuts, and dried fruit.

This recipe uses raisins and walnuts to create a trifecta of chewy raisins, crunchy walnuts, and flakey pastry dough.

This clever food gift uses edible ingredients to aromatize instead of consuming.

A potpourri is a mixture of aromatic spices and essential oils boiled to extract their aromas.

This recipe features two different potpourris using fall ingredients like orange peel, cranberries, cinnamon sticks, and cloves. 

You can bottle the liquid with the whole fruits and spices in mason jars as a quaint gift that looks as beautiful as it smells.

This fun and budget-friendly DIY recipe is the perfect stocking stuffer party favor for your kids to gift their friends.

It starts with melting chocolate and putting it in muffin tin molds.

You can then get creative, putting different toppings like colorful sprinkles and mini marshmallows in each tin before putting a stick in it and throwing it all in the freezer.

Nothing screams fall and winter like a rosemary root vegetable dish. This easy five-minute recipe will supply all your fall dishes with the perfect seasoning. 

All it takes is salt and rosemary blended for five minutes, and voila, you have rosemary-infused salt to up your culinary game.

These adorable mini cinnamon bread loaves are the epitome of Christmas cheer and a great gift for teachers and coworkers.

These loaves are dairy-free, using vegetable oil instead of butter, mixed with cinnamon, sugar, eggs, and flour.

These are dense, pound cake-like loaves with a grainy, crunchy sugar-cinnamon topping. 

Peppermints are the official Christmas candy. If you are tired of licking candy canes, you can use your surplus in this yummy, snow-white dessert recipe.

White chocolate is creamy and sweet, pairing perfectly with crunchy, cooling peppermint in these bite-sized rounds.

You can stack them and wrap them in cellophane with a candy stripe bow for Christmas favors.  

The original cake balls, rum balls are an easy, no-bake dessert that is a cross between a truffle and cookie-dough balls.

The white rum mixed with cocoa, vanilla, crushed cookies, and nuts creates an especially rich bite-sized dessert.

Plus, you can decorate each ball by rolling it in different mixtures of Christmas-colored sprinkles for a colorful and festive presentation.

Jam is an all-purpose flavor agent that also makes a great DIY Christmas gift.

This Spiced Christmas Jam recipe combines cranberries and strawberries with fall spices like cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and ginger.

Its sweetness has a wonderfully spicy finish that will taste wonderful on anything from scones to cheese and crackers.

These creative soup mix ornaments are the perfect Christmas gift, acting first as colorful tree ornaments that you can then empty into a pot of boiling water for a comforting winter meal.

These DIY ornaments involve packing dehydrated veggies, rice, or other grains in single-serving portions into a clear plastic bulb with a gold top.

They look great hanging from a tree and taste great steaming in a bowl!

This decadent homemade candy recipe reminds me of a cream-filled Payday.

Salted Nut Rolls are candy bar-shaped cylinders of chewy caramel and chopped nuts with a marshmallow cream filling.

The chewy, crunchy outer layer cedes to a bouncy marshmallow interior that melts in your mouth.

Another challenging, old-fashioned recipe, toffee requires the same precision and candy thermometers you needed for the salted caramel recipe.

This buttery toffee gets an extra crunch by stirring in roasted almonds.

The bitterness from dark chocolate perfectly balances the sweetness of the toffee.

These are beautiful candy squares that I like to crumble over vanilla ice cream like a Heath bar. 

Christmas Bark recipes are a dime a dozen, but this one from Crafty Morning stands out as the most beautiful and creative in my opinion.

Using pistachios, cranberries, and white chocolate for the green, red, and white Christmas colors, this three-ingredient bark recipe has a trifecta of chewy, crunchy, and creamy.

Growing up, someone would always get sick after eating raw Tollhouse cookie dough out of the tube.

Luckily, you can enjoy raw cookie dough without stomach aches with this edible chocolate chip cookie dough recipe. The key is to leave out the eggs!

The rich brown sugar and vanilla butter paste with the slight crunch from the chocolate chips is almost better than the baked version.

For those Christmas gift procrastinators who wait till the night before to come up with presents for the whole family, this Christmas Trail Mix is for you.

While grocery store shelves may be bare, you’ll probably be able to find the basic ingredients for a simple trail mix in this recipe.

It’s still a festive and tasty trail mix that everyone will love for an afternoon snack. 

Another crunchy, melt-in-your-mouth toffee recipe, this Chocolate Sea Salt Toffee is a labor of love that will impress your loved ones.

I especially liked the recipe format, as a slideshow with pictures and text that you can follow more easily than text alone.

The crunchy sea salt brings out the sweetness in the dark chocolate and the butter in the toffee.

There was nothing I looked forward to more than those giant popcorn tins with partitioned flavored popcorn.

The caramel popcorn was always the fan-favorite, so you can leave out the butter and cheese popcorn and give everyone what they want.

This salted caramel popcorn recipe is as old-fashioned as they get, requiring you to caramelize sugar on the stove before pouring it over freshly popped popcorn

Check out other tasty popcorn flavors and toppings!

Using the same whipped egg white and water method as the candied pecans, these cinnamon candied almonds are the height of elegant holiday gifts.

This recipe uses brown sugar and white sugar for a richer, thicker, and crunchier coating.

I love the cinnamon and brown sugar with the toasted nuttiness of the almonds.

A classy alternative to caramel apples, these Caramel Dipped Pears are stunning edible gifts for the adult crowd.

This recipe streamlines the caramel-making method by having you microwave the butter, condensed milk, and sugar. It creates a gooier liquid, but it hardens just the same. 

I especially liked the idea to dip the bottom of each pear in different sauces and chopped ingredients to create a variety pack. 

Check out our favorite types of pears to find the perfect flavor combo!

Cookie cutters aren’t just for cookies! This recipe uses them as molds to create Christmas-themed fudge.

The fudge is a melt-in-your-mouth blend of butter, sweetened condensed milk, and chocolate chips, with the addition of peppermint extract to make it extra Christmassy.

You simply press the fudge into the mold and top it with colorful candy or nut garnishes.

I’ve listed candied nuts and cinnamon candied nuts, so gingerbread spiced candied nuts are the logical next step.

It’s as easy as the other two recipes, the main difference being the addition of all the spices you find in gingerbread. 

Sugar and spice are a match made in heaven, and nuts are the perfect receptacle for this fall-themed flavor duo. 

Chocolate pretzels are the perfect salty and sweet snack. This recipe doubles the salty-sweet ingredients by pairing pretzels and chocolate with salt and caramel!

Plus, this recipe gives you more bang for your buck by using rectangular pretzels, giving you more surface area for more chocolate and caramel.

This ingenious DIY gift has my vote for the cutest Christmas gift.

You can follow along with the video to create these adorable mini mason jars full of homemade cocoa mix that is topped with a DIY snow globe.

You get a baking and arts and crafts project in one gift. 

My favorite fall muffins are orange cranberry, but it’s awkward to gift them.

Therefore, I’ve found a recipe that transforms my favorite muffin into a poundcake loaf that will brighten up your winter mornings. 

This recipe puts orange zest and juice into the batter for a burst of sweet citrus to surround the tart pop of fresh cranberries and chopped nuts baked in.

Check out other fall flavored desserts to make!

I was skeptical about the combination of cream cheese and mint, but after trying these beautiful bite-sized desserts, I’m a believer!

This simple three-ingredient recipe blends cream cheese, powdered sugar, and mint extract into a creamy icing.

You then separate the icing into three bowls, using red and green food coloring for two of the bowls. The fun part is piping each mint onto a baking pan. 

These tasty chocolate biscuit and peppermint dessert bars are a quick and easy no-bake project that will impress eyes and tastebuds alike.

They only take ten minutes to prepare, then you just throw them in the fridge to set.

This is a great recipe to make the night or morning before your Christmas gathering.

Slow cooker recipes are a godsend, especially when you have multiple other dishes to prepare for your Christmas feast.

This one-pot dessert requires you to throw all the ingredients in your handy crock pot and set the timer.

The key is to layer each ingredient without stirring, so the final product is the desired mound of chocolate peanut almond bark. 

If you’re not keen on trying a recipe, you can still give the gift of food by making a kit of ingredients.

This cute DIY gift idea has you assemble all the ingredients necessary to make a delicious cup of hot cocoa into a bouquet of compartments united by a festive candy-stripe ribbon.

If you’re a fan of Red Hots, this cinnamon rock candy will soon be your favorite Christmas candy.

This recipe has you boil sugar with peppermint candy oil, corn syrup, and red food coloring to create bright red sweet and spicy, old-fashioned candy.

I like to break off bits of this candy to create mosaics or stained-glass windows on my gingerbread houses. 

This user-friendly and delicious twist on dessert pretzels only requires four ingredients and 30 minutes of your time.

This is also a vegan recipe, using vegetable oil, sugar, and cinnamon to create a coating for your pretzel twists.

Baking the sugar cinnamon-coated pretzels maintain their crunch.

You could even create a gourmet dessert trail mix by adding salted caramel popcorn and cinnamon sugar candied nuts!

Another cute mason-jar recipe, whiskey caramel is the dessert sauce you never knew you needed.

This five-ingredient caramel recipe combines brown sugar, heavy cream, and a hearty pour of whiskey into a sumptuously smokey, sweet sauce.

It one-ups the typical caramel sauce and tastes amazing over vanilla ice cream and pumpkin pie.

Just as monkeys pick ticks and twigs carefully from the backs of their fellow mates, so too do we pick hunks of doughy goodness out of their namesake dessert bread. Monkey Bread is as tasty as it is fun to eat.

This fool-proof recipe uses canned buttermilk biscuits cut into quarters to mix with cinnamon sugar to create the perfect pull-apart bread.

These decadent chocolate-covered pretzel rods give you more creative freedom. Most importantly, they give you a much greater chocolate-to-pretzel ratio. 

These rods get an initial coating of milk chocolate that acts as the glue for chocolate chips, which then receive yet another chocolatey drizzle.

You won’t get chocolate fingers either as these rods leave half the pretzel uncovered, acting as an edible lollipop stick. 

An old-fashioned Southern favorite, peanut brittle is a fluffier version of toffee with a perfect peanut crunch.

The key to achieving those airy candy bubbles that brittle is known for is to sprinkle baking soda into the boiling mixture of butter, cream, and sugar.

Another deconstructed recipe gift, this Christmas M&M’s Cookies in a Jar is a fun project for both the giver and receiver.

You stack all the dry ingredients for these cookies in a mason jar, attaching the recipe and instructions with a candy stripe ribbon.

This present is a great idea for families. They can make the cookies and use the mason jar to store any leftovers. 

Snowball Cookies are a delightfully airy and buttery holiday treat for all ages.

They’re similar to Mexican Wedding cookies, consisting of a shortbread-like dough with chopped nuts, rolled into bite-sized balls, and dusted with powdered sugar.

Unlike shortbread, these balls are light and nearly melt in your mouth, with a crunchy finish from the nuts.

Rice crispy treats are the epitome of childhood nostalgia, and this recipe combines nostalgia with holiday sentimentality.

These bite-sized rice crispy treat balls are the best desserts to make with your kids.

They’re classic rice crispy treats, made by melting butter and marshmallows into a sticky goo, stirring in the Rice Crispies and some Christmas-colored sprinkles.

You can leave the hot cocoa kits for the kids. Adults deserve something a little stronger.

That’s where this hot toddy kit comes into play. Hot toddies are essentially bourbon-spiked hot lemonades. They cure colds and bring holiday cheer.

This kit comes in a tasteful round tin with a mini bottle of honey and whiskey, a bundle of cinnamon sticks, and a lemon.  

Check out other holiday cocktails to try!

This crafty dessert is as addicting as it sounds.

Joking aside, “crack” in this case refers to the saltine crackers that make up the foundation of this extra-crunchy toffee and chocolate bark candy.

This dessert pours homemade toffee over a bed of saltine crackers, topping it off with melted chocolate, marshmallows, sprinkles, and Christmas M&Ms. 

Fruit cake has gotten a bad rap for being overly dense and heavy. This recipe claims to upend that infamy, making a fruit cake lover out of the biggest skeptic. 

Using smooth and rich dark rum to soak a myriad of dried fruits ensures that the cake stays moist.

The batter itself is spicy and fruity with citrus zest, crystallized ginger, and baking spices. I recommend throwing in chocolate chips and pecans instead of almonds.

Peppermint and chocolate is a classic winter pairing that has inspired countless ice cream, candy, and cookie flavors. This recipe is a homemade spin on classic York candy.

I was always curious about what goes into making that perfectly soft, melt-in-your-mouth peppermint paste.

For this recipe, the secret ingredients are condensed milk and powdered sugar.

Butter is a delicious flavor agent by itself, but its fat content absorbs any herb, spice, or sweetener you add to it.

This fall-inspired flavored butter recipe is a wonderful gift for your loved ones’ breakfast tables or ingredient pantries. 

This is an easy crock pot recipe, throwing caramel candies, brown sugar, apples, and spices in to simmer.

Panforte is the Italian version of fruit cake. It is a thinner, more elegant dessert than the fruit cake loaves, formed into a rounded cake dusted with powdered sugar.

Instead of soaking fruit in rum, the cake batter receives a few dashes of Marsala wine.

This recipe gives you free rein to choose your favorite nut and fruit combos. 

Learn about other classic Italian cakes.

Nothing says “I love you” more universally than a box of chocolates.

The only thing that says “I love you” more than a box of chocolates is a box of homemade chocolates.

This recipe guides you through the steps of creating gourmet chocolate squares, hollowed out for you to fill with your loved one’s favorite flavors.

These gorgeous Christmas caramel pretzels only require four ingredients, and they taste as stunning as they look.

You simply melt a bag of caramel candies and a bag of chocolate chips in separate bowls, dipping the pretzel twist first into the caramel, then half the pretzel into the chocolate.

Biscotti has long been my favorite dessert pairing for coffee and espresso drinks.

Biscotti are long Italian cookies with a crunchy batter filled with any number of nuts, fruit, or chocolates. Their crunchiness and subtle sweetness absorb coffee flavors as wonderfully as Oreos absorb milk.

This biscotti recipe is a classic almond biscotti dipped partly in melted chocolate

For almond lovers, this dainty and delicious berry and frangipane tartlet will be the perfect gift!

Frangipane is a ground almond custard, blending sugar, eggs, and butter with an almond meal to create a light texture and a rich flavor.

These mini pies have a buttery crust, almondy filling, and a pop of color and tartness from the berry topping. 

This Candy Cane Hot Cocoa Pops recipe is a fun DIY project that you can modify to be as simple or complex as you’d like.

These pops use candy canes as popsicle sticks for melted chocolate and marshmallow bars that melt into a decadent mint-infused hot chocolate.

Peppermint Bark is a fan favorite at the Christmas goodie table, consisting of a double dose of chocolate topped with crunchy peppermint candy.

This recipe shows you how quick and easy it is to make Peppermint Bark.

I like dark chocolate, so I opted for dark chocolate bars and white chocolate as the two foundational layers for the peppermint.

Italian Christmas Cookies are perfect in their simplicity.

They’re thick, balls of chewy sugar cookie with a rich finish from a combination of vanilla and almond extract.

The icing on the cake- or the cookie in this case- is the Christmas-inspired glaze that creates a creamy shell for these decadently chewy cookies.

Check out other classic Christmas cookies to make for the holidays!