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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