The holidays are a time for giving, obviously, but as broke college students, the budget we have to spend is low unfortunately.
Luckily for you, there are a few things that aren’t ridiculously expensive to give your loved ones this holiday season.
Baking treats! Yes, you do have to buy the ingredients, but everyone (or mostly everyone) loves sweets! So, you can’t go wrong. The satisfaction of giving someone treats as a gift, beats a $500 PS5 right?
Anyway, here are some recipes to try and to give to your favorite people.
The first recipe is a yellow cake batter Christmas cookie recipe from thedairyofarealhousewife.com.
Of course you’ll need some yellow cake batter mix, which you can get at the dollar store. You may already have eggs, oil and sugar in your kitchen. Luckily, the recipe isn’t picky, so any type of oil works. Lastly, one would need vanilla extract, but as someone who bakes a lot, imitation vanilla will do just the trick — and it’s a lot cheaper! To top it all off, make sure to add some green and red sprinkles.
For some variety, instead of cookies, you may consider making some peanut butter ‘snowballs.’ This recipe from emilyenchanted.com is a bit more complicated but can be totally worth it. With only four steps to follow, what could go wrong?
Peanut butter is a must and the recipe specifically calls for crunchy. Powdered sugar to give it that snowball feel, and honey just to give it a sweeter kick. Vanilla extract is definitely a must for this recipe but again, vanilla imitation will do the trick! Lemon juice, salt and white chocolate melts is really all you need for this recipe. It’s a lot of steps and ingredients, but having something that you don’t have to bake is a win.
Let’s mix it up a bit, everybody loves cookies but what about rum balls? They sound a bit odd, right? Assuming you’ll give it to someone of legal age, I’m sure they would love this interesting yet satisfying treat.
The full recipe can be found here.
You’ll need corn syrup, vanilla wafers, almonds, powdered sugar, unsweetened cocoa and the main star, rum.
Mix them all together and you get delicious little delights that everyone over the age of 21 would definitely like to try!
The last recipe is something already made for you. A container of Oreos? That already sounds pretty good. But let’s make it look like Christmas. Transform an ordinary Oreo to ‘Christmas tree Oreos.’ You can read more about it here.
These of course require Oreos. The recipe also calls for white and green chocolate candy melts and sprinkles. They require star sprinkles and brown sprinkles but there’s no reason one can’t get creative with it. With a prep time of 10 minutes, it definitely is something one can do if struggling with a gift idea.
These recipes will most definitely leave people wanting more. With every holiday season, baked or non-baked goods are the way to go. Who wouldn’t want something sweet for the holidays?
