Apparently I made raspberry jam this past summer

I say, apparently, because I have no recollection of making this kind of jam. I remember making strawberry, vanilla-rhubarb and vanilla-plum, however. How can I spend an afternoon making something and not remember it?

That's how my summer went. I have several patches of low-memory from the summer. So, when fall slid in, I felt like I never had a summer. I will endeavor to make up for that with Summer 2017!

Anyway, here's the frugal cake that I made to celebrate both my son's (Nov. 19) and his girlfriend's (Nov. 16) birthdays.

The cake, itself, is a scratch vanilla butter cake, using the recipe in this link. I baked it early in the week, and froze the layers. I made a frosting of cocoa powder, butter, confectioner's sugar, vanilla, salt and milk. I had a busy weekend, before the celebration, so I made the frosting a couple of days in advance, and kept it covered in the refrigerator. By doing so, I had the ease of canned frosting, on the day of putting the cake together.

To make our celebration cakes "fancy", I like to split the layers, using my serrated bread knife, and spooning in generous amounts of homemade jam. For this cake, I discovered the homemade raspberry jam in my garage fridge. A delightful surprise to me! (That's the upside of my recent forgetful episode -- lots of stuff come as delightful surprises.) This is a simple trick that really elevates an ordinary layer cake, in a matter of 5 or 10 extra minutes.

Just before putting candles on the cake, I also spooned some warmed jam (warmed, to thin it for pouring) over the top of the chocolate-frosted cake. I love to combination of berries and chocolate.

I estimate that my home-baked, scratch birthday cake cost about $2.50, for the cake, the frosting and the jam. I spent about 1 hour and 10 minutes of hands-on time, making this cake. If I had bought a bakery birthday cake, of this quality, my cost would have been about $25. I compare my scratch cakes to those of a moderate bakery, which would use premium ingredients, such as butter, real vanilla and a fruit filling, in addition to a buttercream icing. In such case, I "earned" about $19 per hour for my time investment.

There are some things in life that matter to me. A cake made with quality ingredients happens to be one of those. I've enjoyed baking since I was 8 years old. It seems fitting that this would be on my personal list of things that brings me enjoyment, both in the consuming and creating.

Making basket filler for gift baskets

Hard to believe, but you can buy shredded paper to use in gift baskets. Retail locations that sell party supplies and gift wrap accessories, sell bags of crinkled, shredded paper, to use as gift-basket bedding, for about $3 a bag.

You can make your own, in minutes, using your home-office paper shredder -- for nothing, if you don't mind using junk mail paper. Or for a couple of pennies, you can use plain paper, or tea-stained paper, or scraps of gift wrap.

Commercially-shredded paper is crinkled. This gives the paper loft and cushions items better than flat paper shreds. When you shred documents at home, you get a pile of matted paper bits. For disposal, those matted shreds are easier to deal with, as they take up less space in your recycling bin. However, for filling a gift box or basket, you want loft in your filler.

You can crinkle your own, home-shredded paper, super-duper easy.

See what happens when you take some of these matted paper shreds --

if you tightly pack these into "snowballs", about the size of your fist,

then fluff it up, you increase the volume of your paper filler, almost by double.

When I was filling my spa basket, I wanted something prettier than our financial documents all shredded up, to cushion the spa gifts.

The day that I tea-stained the poetry scripted papers, I had leftover tea in the baking pan. So, I took an extra few sheets of blank paper and tea-stained those with the leftover tea. Once dried, I put them through our paper shredder. They had a natural look that went well with my basket.

I also had some colorful scraps of wrapping paper that were really too wrinkled or too small to wrap anything. I put those pieces of gift wrap through the shredder, too.

When I tossed the colored and ecru paper together, I had a pretty confetti blend of papers for basket filler, in my spa basket.

I crinkled this filler, using the snowball technique, then filled my gift-basket.

I lined my basket with a large square of pink plastic, which was part of a large shopping bag that I'd acquired a while ago. I opened that bag along the seams, and cut out a large square.

Ten minutes of my time and I saved about $3.

Just a frugal shredded paper tip -- over the holidays, you may receive some gifts wrapped in gift wrap. The good and large pieces can be reused for future holiday gift-wrapping. You can iron on a very low setting to smooth out wrinkles. The smaller pieces, or those with writing on the wrap, or places where tape peeled off the print -- you know, the pieces that you really don't want to reuse -- can be run through your paper shredder in batches of like color. You can make some basket filler for future gifting, with these gift wrap scraps. Remember to tear the tape pieces off, first. They might gum up your shredder.