Gifts for the Pups and Christmas Wrapping 2011

 And because we can't forget the furry friends in your life, today we have homemade dog treats.

I pretty much followed the recipe here.  It makes a pretty big batch of dog treats, but I needed to make 2 batches to feed the large number of labs (5) in my life.  I used the gingerbread men for the big dogs and a variety of small Christmas cutouts for the smaller dogs. 

A couple tips, use the lowest sodium you can for all of the ingredients.  Salt isn't great for dogs.  I found some random brand of peanut butter that didn't contain any sodium or sugar.  You're going to blow the salt count on the beef stock and the beef bouillon granules, but try to find the lowest sodium brands you can.  The Swanson brand of beef stock had over 4x the amount of sodium than the brand I ended up buying.

Morale: read the label!

Also, I used demerara sugar (aka Sugar in the Raw) instead of processed white sugar.  I figured natural is always better.

And no Christmas gift is complete without cute packaging!  I found these awesome labels at Creature Comforts (one of  my favorite blogs) and knew they'd be perfect.  I added my own wording and then printed them out on white card stock.  A white paper bag and a raffia bow and they're all set to go!

And finally, if you've been following this blog since last year, you know how much I love Christmas wrapping.  I scheme for a good couple of months about how I want to wrap my gifts.  And although I've used brown craft paper for the last 3 years (I'm not sure I'll ever use anything else), I keep finding little ways to change it up.

This year I attached a silver ribbon to each box.

 Then I created a darker silver tag that reads, "Merry Christmas.  Love, Jason and Summer".

In the center of each tag is a white clay medallion that has Merry Christmas and the person's named stamped onto it.  They're kind of hard to read in the photos, but they are darling in person.

This may be my favorite wrapping scheme ever.