Fundraising for the Walk for Hunger

Looking back at my posts for the past month, one may think that I didn't do a lot of baking in April. It's true that my days were filled with the usual combo of work/house furnishing/wedding planning craziness but I did manage to bake three Thursdays out of the month in order to bring in baked goods for my individual bake sale to raise funds for the Walk for Hunger.

Instead of soliciting family, friends and coworkers for money (except for my parents, thanks dad and mom!) I took a more passive approach - in true Virgo fashion - and solicited donations in exchange for baked goods in the kitchen area that was closest to my department. This was done with the official permission of my manager. The original plan was to have something available every Friday but I ended up skipping the third Friday because I was too tired from the Earth Day activities I participated in, plus I figured most people would be out of the office during a school vacation week Friday.

The first Friday, I made banana chocolate chip muffins. I was a little disappointed at how well they "sold". Although 20 ended up going by the end of the day, I didn't like the fact that there were two muffins leftover. I attributed this to the small size of the muffins, plus as Andrew comforted me, the muffins are the type of thing that doesn't sound very exciting until you get a chance to taste one.

Second Friday, I made a special effort to pick a crowd-pleasing dessert and the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownies did not fail me - the majority were gone by lunch time and I ended up selling most of a batch of Muddy Buddies (8 bags sold) with Andrew eagerly eating the two bags that were leftover.

Third week I skipped, so to make up for this, I made two more items for last Friday's sale - Vanilla Oreo Cupcakes (the newest recipe courtesy of Beantown Baker) and a batch of my chocolate chip cookie bars.

I spent hours laboring over the cupcakes (later post on this effort to come) and whipped together the batch of the bars as a last minute effort. You can see from the display that I always made attractive signs announcing the which items were available and how the donation woudl benefit Project Bread's efforts to eradicate hunger in Massachusetts. Surprisingly enough, the bars were gone by lunch time while the cupcakes went more slowly (despite my sign's promise that they were chock-full of Oreo chunks) and I ended up having one leftover.

Overall, I raised $111.10 over the three Fridays, which gets doubled due to a generous company match. Was the hours of baking, decorating and cleaning worth it in the end? For $222.20 to help combat hunger (the thought of any child going without food truly kills me), it was well worth the trouble. Especially considering that this set-up worked on the honor system and my coworkers did not fail to be honest and generous in what they took. There was a lot of work projects that kept me from doing much this year, but I'm hoping to expand my efforts next year by hosing a larger scale bake sale.