Bake Sale!

I feel like it's been far too long since I've blogged. Fortunately, this isn't because I haven't been baking. Quite the contrary--I've been too busy baking! As recently as Friday and Saturday I faced one of my biggest experiments yet that I was all too eager to take on: a bake sale! Not only was this my first bake sale ever (so excited, so excited!), but the money raised is being donated to the library district where I work through the Henderson Libraries Foundation! Books and baking? Definitely a fundraiser I can get behind!

The biggest challenge was deciding just what I was going to bring to the table, and when I'd have the time to bake it all. My final menu ended up being: 15 Caramel Apples, 48 Peanut Butter Thumbprint cookies, 12 Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes, and 3 good old fashioned Pumpkin Pies! These sounded like perfect fall treats, were a great mix of successfully tested recipes and recipes I'd been wanting to try, and were easy enough to make in the short period of time I had free after work Thursday evening (four hours of baking from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.) and on Saturday morning (another hour and a half before work).

I wasn't the only one baking, of course. Our talented library staff pulled out all the stops with a variety of goods that included cupcakes, muffins, cookies, brownies, cereal bars, lemon bars, sheet cakes, cake pops, cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, breads, Buckeyes and more! Tomorrow I'll learn the grand total amount of just how much we raised together. I couldn't be more proud. And more inspired to bake than ever.

I don't know if I'll ever own my own bake shop (maaaybe one day...) but I can go all out with any bake sale I encounter, having a blast baking up big batches of treats for the members of my community and wrapping them in eye-catching adornment from craft shops like Michael's for the perfect presentation. I live for this kind of thing.

My experiences with each bake sale recipe, and my personal twists on those recipes, coming soon!