Cookie contest winner, a jam save, and more!

Hello, frugal peoples!   I’ve got a bunch of miscellaneous stuff for you all today, starting with cookie news. 😉

Cookie Contest Winner

The first person to guess the correct cookie arrangement was Sarah P.   Congrats, Sarah! I hope you have fun shopping with your Amazon gift card.

Since you all are probably curious about the correct answers, here ya go!

Sonia made Bertha, the blue fish-lips cookie.

Mr. FG made the angry candy cane.

I made the worried tree.

(A lot of you got that right.   The neat frosting must have been a giveaway…)

Zoe made the track-pants-wearing snowman.

Joshua made the adorable blue snowflake (love it).

And Lisey made the mad scientist. (Very few of you guessed that one right!)

Thank you so much for playing along, you guys! My whole family gets a lot of delight in choosing cookies for this game and from checking your guesses as they roll in.

The eye candies we use

We used these  candy eyeballs  this year, although normally I’m able to snag very similar ones from Aldi on an after-halloween clearance.

But this year I had no such luck, so I bought these at a craft store using a 40% off coupon.

We highly recommend adding some eyeballs to your decorating arsenal. Eyeballs + chocolate jimmies make for some really fun faces!

A small frosting win

In years past, I’ve usually put our frosting into smallish bowls as we decorate, but the problem is that our heavy-handled knives tend to fall right out of those bowls.

So this year it finally dawned on me to use some flatter containers, and that worked beautifully.   No knives clunked on the table, and all was well.

I fixed some crystallized jam.

Some of our raspberry jam had started to look very unappealing because most of the sugar had crystallized.

I consulted the ever-helpful Google for advice and read that a little heating and stirring would fix the jam right up.

I’m please to report that this is true!

I just microwaved it for 30 seconds, stirred, and boom, it’s like new.

No turkey?   Well, chicken will do.

I didn’t host Thanksgiving, so I had no turkey carcass to make broth with like so many of you did.   But I did have a good stash of chicken bones in the freezer, so when I had a couple of recipes that needed chicken broth, I emptied my bag of bones and made a big pot of broth.

I had extra even after my two chicken-broth-requiring recipes, so I froze the extra.

(This is how I make chicken broth that actually tastes good, by the way.)

Once a plastic bag has held raw bones (some of the bones I freeze are not cooked), I never feel like I can use it for anything else, no matter how well I wash it.

So, I washed out my bag and stuck it back in the freezer to wait for more bones.

I do love making broth.   It’s such a satisfying thing to make a super nutritious, tasty liquid out of what seems like useless discards.

Third Day Naturals Giveaway Winner

Congrats to Caitlin! You’ve won yourself a gift set from Third Day Naturals.

They’ll be in contact with you so you can choose your scents and then they can get your stuff shipped on out to you.

The rest of you will be happy to know that you can get 15% off your order right now, plus free shipping on orders of $35 or more!

Just visit  Third Day Naturals  and use code TDNgift to get your 15% discount.   You can snag some holiday gifts and stocking stuffers (or stock up on products for yourself!) at a great price!

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By the way, I’ve got one more holiday giveaway coming up…this Saturday, from Amani Ya Juu.

I love all the giving away I get to do at Christmas! 😉