Donna Hay Shares her Top Christmas Gift Wrapping Ideas

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting THE food styling queen, and one of my big foodie inspirations, Donna Hay. I attended a masterclass she conducted at the new Canberra Centre Modern Lifestyle Precinct, where she gave tips on Foodie Gifts, which is totally my area of interest! Donna had some great ideas and I was impressed at how simple, cost-effective and quick these idea are. I wanted to share them with you,  so hopefully you find some inspiration for your own personalised Foodie Christmas gifts.

Photo above via Herald Sun; photo below via The Canberra Centre

Donna Hay Shares her Top Christmas Gift Wrapping Ideas for Food Gifts

These are all really versatile ideas; you can use home made or store bought food, the fillers can be easily adapted to dietary requirements and can be made as simple and fancy as you wish! Here’s how Donna Hay recommends you style your food gifts this Christmas:

Truffle or bliss balls box

Using a half dozen egg carton, Donna placed 1 home made truffle into each section of the carton and finished it off with a Christmas ribbon. For a healthier alternative to a chocolate truffle, try filling these with my Coffee, Chocolate and Pistachio Bliss Balls would work perfectly!

Chocolate-chip cookies in paper CD case

Donna made the yummiest giant chocolate chip cookies and put them in a brown paper CD case with a clear window. It would be a great one to do with your little ones to give to their friends; you could make the cookies together and package them together.  Such an easy and cost-effective little gift idea!

Monaro Mall Launch – Canberra Centre Donna Hay Shares her Top Christmas Gift Wrapping Ideas for Food

Cookbook and tea towel

I loved Donna’s technique for gift wrapping. She wrapped a cookbook in a lovely tea towel instead of wrapping paper, inspired by the Japanese wrapping technique called Furoshiki. This is a simple way to give multiple homeware gifts that complement each other. You could also add a nice cooking utensil for an extra touch. I’ve added below some of my favourite tea towels and decor for your Gift Wrapping, along with where you can buy them, because really, who wants to spend more time at the shops at Christmas?

Pretty Kitchen Tea Towels for Christmas Gift Wrapping

Recipe Food Hamper

Donna created a simple food hamper by only using items that would be used in the kitchen, right down to the presentation of the gift. She presented some ingredients in glass jars with a recipe printed out in a lovely loaf tin and tied it together with a tea towel to finish it off. She said that this gift was “encouraging little people and big people to cook, which I love, and you don’t have to do the cooking yourself.” Couldn’t have said it up better myself!

Granola Jar

Donna added home-made granola (try my healthy low GI granola recipe) into a glass jar, added a paper patty pan face top down and tied it off with a piece of twine. She also used this same technique with jars of other snacks, like pretzels and nuts. This took less than 2 minutes for her to do.

This is similar to what I did for Christmas last year (gosh Donna, stop copying my trends) but I added bells to ribbon around colourful patterned jar lids.

Natural Gift Decorations

Other tips she had for decorating wrapped gifts was using flowers and plants, such as rosemary, for fresh presentation. In the past I have used nice kitchen utensils as a decoration, it also doubles as a second present.

Have you got any foodie gift wrapping ideas? I would love to hear them!