Homemade Birthday Gift

It's been a few days since my last post, was busy preparing the coming soon baby and other stuff. Today's post is about a birthday I gave recently to my friend, Sarita, who has a really nice blog about gifting, visit her blog here. Since she has huge thing about gift, I wanted to give her something that really special, so I had thoughts about my gift a week before her birthday and I came up with a homemade birthday gift idea.

As the title said, I wanted the gift to be made by myself, including the packaging, so I decided to make chocolate truffle for the birthday gift and I sticked toothpick with alphabetical flags that says "Happy Birthday Sarita!" Then I made the packaging with a cereal box, covered it with gift paper and I added a handmade origami ribbon for accessories. Well, actually I made them in the reverse order as I made the box first, then the flags and the last thing is the chocolate truffle :-D

Here is the box that I made:

At first I browsed for a gift box template that we can download for free from the internet, unfortunately my printer couldn't afford to print in a larger scale than A4 paper and all the templates are too small if I printed them on A4 paper. Then I found the cereal box and I thought I could make a gift box from it. Thankfully it was a success on the first attempt, because I happened to have only one cereal box :-D The hardest part is the fact that I don't have a ruler at home, so I measured everything by heart or using a small note book.

I learned how to make the origami ribbon from the tutorial in this blog. Believe me it looks complicated at first, but then once you tried it, it's not that hard.

For the flags, I designed them with Adobe Photoshop then printed them on a paper and cut through the shapes. After that I sticked the flags to the toothpicks. Here is the result:

As usual, I used the recipe of Joy of Baking to make the chocolate truffle. You could find the recipe here. To make chocolate truffle is really easy, however I've got to tell you that it's a very messy job when shaping the ball and cover it with cocoa powder. I guarantee that you'll have chocolate all over your hands and clothes :-D Here is my chocolate truffle:

I made two types of topping, the left one is using cocoa powder and the next one is using coco crunch that I've crushed into small parts. I was quite worried that the chocolate truffle would be melted on the way I delivered the gift to her. Apparently, they are quite steady and Sarita said that they were good. Yeay! I could see that she was quite happy receiving my gift, so mission is accomplished :-)

Cheers,
Indispensable Lady

PS: I didn't take picture of the chocolate truffle sticked with the flagged toothpick because I was too worry that leaving the chocolate truffle in a room temperature during photo shoot would melt the chocolate. But well you'll get my idea, right? :)