Homemade Hot Drink Mixes: 3 Ways

Homemade hot drink mixes make a perfect holiday gift, in 3 delicious flavors including sakura matcha latte, salted vanilla hot cocoa, and unicorn white hot chocolate. Just add hot milk!

If you’re looking for a cute and clever homemade gift idea, these sweet drink mixes are just the ticket! Packaged in cute glass jars with colorful gift tags (free printable download at the bottom of this post!) they’ll warm the hearts (and stomachs) of anyone lucky enough to receive them.

For these adorable and giftable drink mixes, I took 3 of my most popular drink recipes (including the infamous unicorn hot chocolate as well as my sakura matcha latte and salted vanilla hot chocolate) and remade them as powdered drink mixes that are super easy to make (the hardest part is tracking down the various powders and jars) and perfect for gifting!

As easy as the mixes themselves are to make, they are even easier to turn into a delightful hot beverage: just add hot milk! You can even use almond, soy, or coconut milks… whatever your heart desires (do note the unicorn mix does have milk powder in it so it is not dairy free).

Personally I like to mix the powder with about 1 ounce of the hot milk first (you’ll make something like a thin paste), and then whisk in the remaining milk. This keeps the mix from getting clumpy (this is especially helpful for the salted vanilla cocoa, the others dissolve quite a bit more easily).

For iced versions, you can also pour over ice (I love me an iced matcha in the summer), or even blend it up with some ice or vanilla ice cream (hello frozen hot chocolate!)

The unicorn hot chocolate was perhaps the trickiest recipe to convert to powdered form, since it originally called for pink gel food coloring as well as white chocolate syrup.

I played with a few different options for the powdered coloring, including powdered food color (which is oh so messy and hard to come by in pink), as well as ground beet powder and raspberry powder. But what ultimately gave me the best color was powdered dragonfruit. It does make for a slightly speckled appearance, but the cotton candy pink is exactly what I was going for. The quantity in the recipe is so minimal that it really doesn’t affect the flavor of the drink at all (the same was true for the beet powder, thankfully, and you could certainly substitute that if you prefer, it just results in more of a light red color vs a cotton candy pink).

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Sweet Potato Hash Browns

Veggie Dippers with Yogurt Dill Sauce

Chewy Molasses Chocolate Chip Cookies

Robustly flavored and delightfully chewy, these sugar-coated molasses cookies are studded with finely shaved chocolate for a unique twist on a classic holiday cookie.

When you can’t decide between a richly spiced molasses cookie and a classic chocolate chip, this recipe is for you! These cookies are so simple to whip up, with an intense gingerbread flavor and delightfully soft chew, they’ll be your new go-to holiday recipe for years to come!

Ok, so these really shouldn’t be called chocolate chip cookies, but chocolate fleck cookies or shaved chocolate cookies just doesn’t have the same ring to it. They are first and foremost a chewy molasses cookie… with some finely grated chocolate mixed in.

Ideally you want to grate the chocolate with a cheese grater, or shave flakes off the bar using a sharp knife (don’t chop… shave). These thin flakes of chocolate will almost melt into the cookie as it bakes, giving it a rich depth of flavor without interrupting the chewy goodness.

It’s the same way I infused extra chocolate into my salt and pepper sable cookies: again, the texture of the cookie is best when uninterrupted by chips.

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Best Christmas Cookie Recipes

Our list of best Christmas cookie recipes has something for everyone, from soft gingerbread cookies to buckeyes with a healthy spin!

Are you looking for the best Christmas cookie recipes for your cookie tray? If you know Alex and me, you know we’re into healthy cookie recipes…or really, healthier cookies! Here are our top 5 best Christmas cookie recipes that we think would be perfect for your Christmas cookie tray! They all have a healthier spin…but you’d never know it!

Related: Eat these cookies with our Gingerbread hot chocolate!

What’s a healthy cookie? Or…healthier cookie

So what’s a healthy cookie? Honestly, we wish there were a better word than healthy. Because cookies in themselves are not healthy! Alex and I like to use a few strategies for making healthy– that is, healthier cookie recipes! Here’s our approach:

• Use nutrient dense real food ingredients. We love incorporating nutrient dense ingredients to counteract the typical loads of butter, white flour and refined sugar. Almond butter, peanut butter, oats, almond flour, and maple syrup all make appearances in our best Christmas cookie recipes.
• Amp the flavor. We use spices and natural flavors to bring in big flavor, instead of relying just on sugar. For example, there are abundant chai spices in our snowball cookies, or lots of gingerbread spices and molasses in our soft gingerbread cookies.
• Use just enough sugar. For every Christmas cookie recipe we make, we adjust the sugar content so that it tastes amazing: not too sweet, but just right.

And even though they’re healthier, we hope you’ll find all our best Christmas cookie recipes are just plain delicious. Here are our top favorites:

Soft Gingerbread Cookies

First up in our best Christmas cookie recipes: these soft gingerbread cookies! Growing up, my family used to take my sister and me to a holiday display at Christmas, a life-sized department store window display filled with animated characters. My sister and I would wait in expectation for the very end so we could have huge, soft gingerbread cookies. Ever since then I’ve been on a quest for perfect soft gingerbread cookies: spicy, soft, and gooey. And I think we’ve found it! In this healthier version of gingerbread, we’ve used almond butter to stand in for much of the butter, and thrown in some wheat flour a few extra nutrients. A bit of applesauce helps keep them soft. And this gingerbread cookie recipe is finished with turbinado sugar instead of icing, which is a more natural sugar (plus, it’s much easier than icing!).

Pecan Butter Millionaire Bars

These pecan butter millionaire bars have 3 layers: shortbread, caramelized maple pecans, and chocolate! This easy vegan dessert recipe couldn’t be tastier. For our version, we’ve transformed millionaire bars into a vegan dessert that’s a bit lighter than the original. The shortbread layer is simply flour, coconut oil, and maple syrup. And instead of a caramel layer, it’s got caramelized pecans! Nutrient rich pecans are caramelized on the stovetop with a bit of maple syrup in a skillet, then blended in a food processor into a pecan butter. The maple pecan butter filling is so tasty, and much more nutrient dense than the typical caramel. And then of course, top with semi sweet chocolate! It’s an incredibly crowd pleasing dessert and one of our best Christmas cookie recipes!

Chai Spice Almond Snowball Cookies

These almond snowball cookies are spiced Christmas cookies with a twist: they’re naturally gluten free, made with almond flour and cozy chai spices! This rich chai spice cookie that got rave reviews from friends and family, and now many readers! The cardamom is the star of the show here; it’s what gives chai spice its familiar zing! We’ve used coconut sugar an alternative sweetener that’s a bit lower on the glycemic scale; you can feel free to substitute brown or white sugar.

These chai spice almond snowball cookies are made using almond flour (ground almonds), which we like to use in our naturally gluten free desserts. Some grocery stories carry both almond flour and almond meal, so make sure to look for almond flour. Almond flour is ground finer and made from blanched almonds, which have no skins (almond meal is courser and made from almonds with skins). Even though they’re made entirely of almonds, these cookies are light and crumbly: undoubtedly one of our best Christmas cookie recipes!

Perfect Homemade Peanut Butter Cups

OK, so homemade peanut butter cups aren’t really cookies…but hear us out! These peanut butter cups are so delicious, and homemade candies and goodies are what the holidays are all about! They’d be perfect on a cookie tray or as handmade Christmas treats. How to make perfect homemade peanut butter cups? Basically, take tempered chocolate and let it harden around a peanut butter filling in a mini muffin tin. For our filling, we added maple syrup to peanut butter and a tiny bit of powdered sugar. Then to bring in a complexity, we added some allspice and vanilla extract. After he tasted these, Alex exclaimed: “It’s even better than Reese’s and Justin’s peanut butter cups!” Want to see if you agree? Head over to the recipe to see why it’s one of our best Christmas cookie recipes.

Healthy Peanut Butter Buckeye Balls Recipe

This healthy peanut butter buckeye balls recipe takes the classic chocolate peanut butter buckeyes and adds a healthy twist!  Buckeyes weren’t a big part of my childhood growing up in Minnesota, but they’re certainly the rage here in Indiana around the holidays. Essentially peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate, they’re little bites of heaven. Any other buckeye fans out there? Instead of the traditional butter and sugar, in this healthy buckeye balls recipe we’ve substituted Medjool dates. Medjool dates are large, chewy and sweet dates that are used to make natural sweets like Larabars and raw brownies. Add a little peanut butter, and voila — instant buckeye filling! Dipped in a little chocolate, these little bites taste very similar to the original, but without the butter and refined sugar. They’re certainly not a health food, but they’re more natural than most of the treats out there this time of year!

We hope you enjoy our best Christmas cookie recipes! Here are a few more resources from around the web:

• 81 Festive Christmas Cookie Recipes | Bon Appetit
• 25 Best Holiday Cookies Recipes | Two Peas and Their Pod

A Couple Cooks - Healthy, Whole Food, Vegetarian Recipes

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Raspberry Amaretti Cookies

My favorite soft amaretti cookies get a bright and fruity twist with the addition of freeze-dried raspberries.

Almond and raspberry make for a perfect pairing, these luscious little cookies are proof of that. The punch of vibrant raspberry flavor comes from ground up freeze-dried raspberries, which offer an intense flavor without adding any extra moisture.

In follow up to last week’s soft amaretti cookie recipe, I thought I’d offer up this unique variation: raspberry amaretti!

It’s basically the exact same recipe with the addition of ground up freeze-dried raspberries.

But that one little change makes a huge difference. I honestly can’t decide if I love the originals better or this bright and fruity variation (I’ll have one of each, please… don’t make me decide).

In fact, these turned out so well I’m tempted to try more variations. Blueberry, maybe? Or what about a chocolate version? Maybe I’ll work on that one for next year!

Sure, they look a little bit like smoldering meteors from mars (or ready to hatch dinosaur eggs), but taste a heck of a lot better (I assume, I’ve never actually tasted a smoldering meteor).

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Roasted Tomato White Cheddar Mac and Cheese