Nuffnang Coles Group & Myer: How Do You Turn $10 into $100?

This will be my last entry on this blog before I move. Nuffnang Australia had a little contest where 50 people could turn their $10 Coles/Myer Giftcard into $100! So, I had to take up the challenge too. We had two challenges, challenge 1 was to spend the $10 in a creative way, and challenge 2 was to be frugal. I lack creativity, so being frugal it is! As an International student in Melbourne, attempting to be cheap is what I attempt to do best.

It was my friend's belated 24th birthday party on Sunday, the 30th of August. So I had to bring some food there to share! So I decided upon making countless amounts of sugar cookies! With my $10, I bought the ingredients I needed.

Coles Smart Buy 2 KG White Sugar: $1.65
Coles Smart Buy 1 KG Plain Flour: $0.95
You'll Love Coles Milk: $1.37
Coles Smart Buy Butter: $2.49
Queen Blue Food Colouring: $1.12
Queen Yellow Food Colouring: $1.12
Queen Red Food Colouring: $1.12

This comes to a total of $9.82! I should note that I only used a fraction of the ingredients here to make my cookies. So I could easily make a second batch.

Now for the actual baking! The recipe I used was...

Rolled Sugar Cookies

INGREDIENTS

• 340 g butter, softened
• 400 g white sugar
• 4 eggs
• 625 g all-purpose flour
• 9 g baking powder
• 6 g salt

DIRECTIONS

1. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight).
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
3. Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.

and

Sugar Cookie Frosting

INGREDIENTS

• 480 g confectioners' sugar
• 100 g shortening
• 75 ml milk
• food coloring

DIRECTIONS

1. In a large bowl, cream together the confectioners' sugar and shortening until smooth. Gradually mix in the milk and vanilla with an electric mixer until smooth and stiff, about 5 minutes. Color with food coloring if desired.

After baking the cookies as following the directions, me and my housemate had a wonderful time decorating them. It took us 5 hours to get all the cookies done as there was THAT MANY.

My camera is pretty bad so the quality of images are terrible unfortunately. But yes, this is stage one of our decorating. We mixed food colouring together to get different colours for the icing.

In the end we made a lot of cookies. Enough to fill up a whole tray and then some more. There were a number of shapes including hearts, stars, flowers, the moon, mushroom and a diamond shape.

The cookies were taken well at the party! Everyone liked them. And they were so bright and fun to eat. A few better pictures are below since my camera takes better photos in actual light.

Cute happy faces, poisonous mushrooms and other weird patterns. You can see a watermelon shaped cookie and a banana there too!

This was one of my favourite patterns. It had all the colours on it! I thought it was really pretty.


This is a photo taken with my friend's camera. As he has an actual camera which can take quality photos rather then my point and shoot camera with a broken flash, I suppose it made the cookies look a lot better. But yeah, the cookies were a success.

Thank you to Nuffnang for the awesome contest! I could bake more biscuits if I really wanted too, lol. Perhaps I shall.