I was playing around with the fodder in Crystal Glacier, and found you could get some good proxies off of them. After some messing around with it, I found what could be a new strat for getting into the talisman room:

As the video says, you do gain ~7-8 seconds, but you lose about 25 or 30 gems. Could the time save make up for the gem loss?

I was messing around with the ones at the start, but couldn't get a high enough proxy to skip the whole level (maybe with TAS it'd be possible). Athough you could potentially get a high enough proxy to get over to the lower platform (two vases and a snow wizard), allowing you to easily setup for Saboom's wall glide Moneybags skip. But like you said, snowballs are hard to proxy, and just doing this video with savestates took about 10-15 minutes.

In my first run of this game I accidentally proxied off that exact fodder. I still have the highlight: http://www.twitch.tv/iamraiu/c/2067780