What: Charity Bake Sale.
Where: Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.
More precisely: South Common Room.
When: Wednesday 2nd March.
We will be holding a charity bake sale in the Department of Engineering on Wednesday the 2nd of March. We’ll be selling cakes in the South Common Room between 10:30 and 11:30 and again between 14:30 and 15:30. We’re running this event exclusively for Macmillan Cancer Support, so all proceeds of the cake sales will be going directly to Macmillan. It promises to be a lot of fun and will hopefully raise a lot of money for a great cause.
Post Bake Sale Update
Well, that was a fantastic success. I arrived to start setting up at around 9.30, with a tray full of chocolate brownies because they are the only thing that I can bake. Laura arrived shortly after with float money.
The table of cake was soon set up, and next up Laura, Geraldine and Paul T sorted out the prices while I stressed away quietly. We had loads of cake, everyone kept bringing cake. What if nobody turned up? I could end up spending my day entirely surrounded by cake. I pondered the inevitable disaster until the queue arrived at 10.30.
We’d set aside an hour for setting things up, and we used all of it before the queue arrived. We immediately started selling masses of cake and now I was worrying about running out of cake. I don’t know why, but I seemed to be intent on worrying about this bake sale far more than was strictly necessary.
In fact, the only hiccup really was it turned out that some genius (aka me) had put one time on the poster and a different time on the e-mail out to people who were staffing the stall. Nobody had picked up on it. In the end between all the people who had donated cake and passers by we managed to staff the stall for the whole day, rather than just the two one hour slots originally planned. This was partly because I didn’t want to worry about packing everything up and unpacking it again later.
I attempted to do some work from the stall, but this didn’t go to well, luckily my research group pretty much took care of themselves while I sold cake and raffle tickets. We had raffle prizes from Giles & Co, Fudge Kitchen, crepeaffaire and the Cambridge University Kickboxing Club. We’d also had some cake donated by the bakers, including a rather cool hedgehog cake, which was the obvious choice for first prize. For about half the day I was worried about the raffle, partly because we had more prizes than raffle tickets sold. In the end I needn’t have worried.
Most of the day became a bit of a blur, I met lots of wonderful new people, some of them helping out with the stall, some of them just there to buy cake.
Just before the scheduled second slot, more cake arrived, and then I discovered more cake waiting for me in the office. We were suddenly overflowing with cake again, and then I started worrying about whether we would sell it all. This engineering department runs on tea and cake, so it was clearly a stupid thing to worry about.
We held the raffle, I made sure I didn’t have to pull any tickets out the bucket, but I won a prize anyway, which made me feel rather Father Ted. I didn’t win the hedgehog cake, but I did win the fudge. There was no way I was giving up the fudge!
By 4.30 we had cleared up and I was actually rather tired, which was stupid because everyone else had done the hard work, all I’d done was hang around and sell cake. Laura helped me count up to see how much we had raised, and the first count was £689 directly from the cash box and donation tins.
It turns out that we had raised £729 (and still counting) through our bake sale, which must be some kind of record.
That night I had nightmares of still being on the stand, being handed more and more cake. For some reason, one of the cakes was some kind of pineapple upside-down cake. Which was strange because it was the one kind of cake we didn’t have on the stall. Anyway, despite the nightmares it was all worth it.
I am almost certain to have dropped off some names off this list (in which case both please forgive me and please let me know!), but here are the people who are really responsible for the day being a success, massive thanks to you all:
Anna, Caryn, Cassie, David C, Diane, Eleanor, Elena, Emma E, Emma S, Geraldine, Jan, Jo, Joan, Karolina, Kate G, Kate K, Kerry M, Kirsten, Klara, Laura, Madeline, Mehves, Niamh, Oliver, Patrick, Patrick G, Paul T, Petra, Rachel, Roberta, Sally, Sonia, Stephen S, Vicki, Vika,
And also big thanks to everyone who came and bought cake or donated. Y’all ate a lot of cake!