The Best Gift Ever

My best friend Ilana lives in Edinburgh, which is a gorgeous and absolutely wonderful place to live and visit, but really inconvenient for us when it comes to typical best friend activities like grabbing coffee or shopping or laying about watching movies in pajamas, or really just about anything that requires that we both be on the same continent.

We do make a point of meeting up about once or twice a year, either here in New York or somewhere else interesting. (Past locations include Portugal and Palm Springs; we're hoping for a Greek island next year!)

But, as amazing as those trips are, they're never quite enough.

Fortunately, Ilana also happens to be really amazing at surprises! They show up every so often: a postcard with a recipe for deep-fried Mars bars (a well-loved Scottish delicacy), a set of Kate Spade bangles inscribed with inspirational messages, and--most recently--the most wonderful gift ever:

A custom-made necklace featuring a perfect mini slice of my signature cake: The Italian Rainbow Cookie Cake!

Ilana found this wonderful shop on Etsy and had the artists custom make the charm.

And they did such an incredible job! They even got the detail of the snowflake design on the chocolate frosting!

The texture of the layers looks so realistic I really had to resist biting into it...

I'm, admittedly, nowhere near equal to Ilana when it comes to thoughtful surprises. I come up with great ideas, but then my ADD kicks in and I get distracted trying to make ice cream out of wine or researching mid-century gelatin salad recipes or trying to figure out how to turn an old t-shirt into a throw pillow, and then I can't really remember what the great plan was.

You guys have no idea how many unsent postcards I have in my desk.*

But, I do, fortunately have this blog! And that means that on this blog I can let the thousands and thousands of you who come here every day know how wonderful Ilana is.

(Very.)

I also wanted you all to know about the wonderful little Etsy shop she found!

It's called Inedible Jewelry and you can visit it here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/inediblejewelry/

If you have food lovers (or miniature lovers!) in your life--I bet they'd enjoy a sweet gift from there just as much as I did.

But hurry--Christmas orders have to be in by the 18th (aka...tomorrow!).

*I do have a good plan for Christmas this year, though I haven't quite made it to the post office yet. (Fortunately Ilana is Jewish, which I think gives me a bit of leeway in terms of the deadline.)


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