Don’t know what to get your friend/partner/child/auntie for Christmas? You can never go wrong with something edible. Here are our top ten picks, working from the cheapest upwards.
Now these are our kind of crackers – they’re probably the fanciest kind you can buy, and would look great balanced on a Christmas tree branch. Each red and gold cracker contains three dark chocolate Champagne truffles made by England’s Charbonnel et Walker (the name is misleadingly French!). The company is endorsed by the Royal Warrant as chocolate manufacturers to the Queen, so we’re sure they’ll taste pretty spectacular.
Price: £5 each
Available from: John Lewis
One of the prettiest vintage tins we’ve seen this Christmas. Churchills red and gold Victorian carousel looks like it belongs in the Mary Poppins movie, and is beautifully detailed throughout. It’s begging to sit on your coffee table within arm’s reach of the TV remote control, and the abundance of gold- and silver-wrapped pieces of soft toffee and fudge will keep the family going until the New Year.
Price: £10.99
Available from: Ocado.com
These super teapots designed by Louise Buchan would look ace on any kitchen wall! The perfect gift for tea lovers, each one is glazed and comes with a hanging hole in the back so that you can attach it to your surface of choice. Perhaps somewhere novel to hang tea towels? Or your collection of whisks? You can buy the same kind of thing in porcelain instead of ceramic, for £1 extra per pot. A great place to store wooden spoons, we think.
Price: £14 per pot
Available from: notonthehighstreet.com
Be the coolest kid on the block with this ingenious ‘rainbow layering’ cocktail maker. With its ultra-slow controlled pour, it prevents different density liquids from mixing, resulting in a pretty cool layered effect for any cocktail. We think it would be perfect for one of Nick Strangeway’s cocktails.
Price: £14.50
Available from: Divertimenti
Oil and balsamic vinegar are must-haves at any dinner party, and we think this is the coolest way to display them both. Made from mouth-blown glass, this ‘globe within a globe’ has two dripless pourers (one for oil, the other for vinegar) and comes with its own rubber-painted wooden stand. It could be a permanent centrepiece on your dining table – after all, the colours of olive oil and balsamic vinegar work really well together.
Price: £17.99
Available from: Lakeland
Now we know that no-one really needs a robot-shaped nutcracker, but this little fella is just too sweet to ignore. It’s a vintage-looking wind-up robot whose specialist task is to crack open nuts – place your almond/walnut/anything else into the robot’s belly and twist the key to crack open the shell. Apparently he’ll crack open anything ‘from the smallest hazelnut to the toughest walnut’. Made from solid beech wood and finished with a gleaming retro paint job.
Price: £18
Available from: The Science Museum Shop
Know someone who takes ingredients really seriously? Then a ‘Cinnamon Hill starter pack’ is just the ticket for their Christmas present. It contains a specially designed cinnamon grater (crafted in honey oak), a hand-made ceramic cup to catch it all, and sample sticks of two types of fresh cinnamon: ‘Ceylon’, which comes from Sri Lanka and has a citrusy aroma, and ‘Saigon’, which comes from Vietnam and has a distinctly sweet taste.
Cinnamon Hill buy their cinnamon at harvest and mark the date on every pack, so you can be assured of freshness. Apparently stale supermarket cinnamon will splinter when grated, but Cinnamon Hill cinnamon won’t!
Price: £35 for the starter pack
Available from: only online at cinnamonhill.com
Nudo is an adoption programme which allows you to sponsor an Italian olive tree or Darjeeling tea garden for a year, in return for all of its finest produce delivered straight to your door. Both can be adopted ‘as a gift’ and, for the olive trees, you can pick a grove either in the east of Italy or Sicily. There’s loads of information about each grove on their website, plus tasting notes on what kind of oil that particular species of tree will produce. You can also pick from a wide variety of tea gardens, and even chose which season you want your fresh, organic tea delivered to you.
Nudo’s adoption programme is all about connecting people to the source of their food, so you can even go and visit your tree/tea garden and be shown around by the farmer. Better start saving for flights!
Price: olive oil tree (as a gift) from £39; Darjeeling tea garden (as a gift) from £18
Available from: only online at Nudo
If you’re buying for a meat lover, and you have high hopes that they’ll cook for you over the festive period, then we recommend getting them a mega meat box from Todenham Manor Farm in Gloucestershire. Their cheapest hamper (at £66.50) includes a selection of home cured bacon, traditional pork sausages, a gammon joint, and a choice of either a topside, rib, sirloin or fillet joint of 28-day aged beef.
The box can cater for either six or 12 people, and should set you up for at least two days over Christmas. Plus you can be assured of excellent quality – Todenham Manor Farm has won Great Taste Awards three years in a row.
Price: £66.50 for six
Available from: todenhammanorfarm.co.uk
Teenagers can be hard to buy for but instead of another computer game, why not get them something useful and wholesome this year? Say a cookery course set in the great outdoors at Kate Humble’s working farm in South Wales?
The Humble By Nature team run a huge variety of cookery courses throughout the year, but one that particularly caught our eye was the Teenage Cookery Skills series, comprising an ‘essentials’ and ‘vegetarian essentials’ course. Both are great for pre-University preparation, especially considering the focus on how to cook delicious meals on a shoestring, and what to do with leftovers. Example recipes include vegetable fritters, apple crumble, homemade pesto, and cheese sauces. Plus they’re led by MasterChef finalist Andrew Ko Jima.
Price: £75 per person
Available from: humblebynature.com
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