Tuesday 22 May 2012

The fabulous baking sisters

I’m a bit behind in my blog posts at the moment because I haven’t written about our amazing trip to Berlin and Hamburg. Problems with IT blocking my blog at work (classifying blogs as ‘not work related’ – how can that be?!!) as well as no internet at home means I’ve sort of dropped off the face of the blogging earth. But before I get back to my regular posts, this next one deserves a special post of its own.

My hugely talented sister, J, is a designer and was approached by some events people in her local area to design flyers for the upcoming
Hither Green festival. In exchange for her design talents, she was rewarded with a stall at the Saturday food and craft fair and of course, roped me in to do it with her. As both of us have blogs about our love for food (check out J’s blog here and her home renovation blog as well) we email every day and always talk about food, we visit restaurants and immediately want details as to what each other ate, it seemed very appropriate that we should have a baking stall.
 
The fabulous baking sisters

The day started early and a short ten hours later, we were done for the day. Injure-bread men (gingerbread men missing arms or heads) lamingtons, carrot cake, lemon yogurt cake, triple chocolate cookies, chocolate brownies, red velvet cupcakes, vanilla cupcakes and pupcakes. All iced, sprinkled, sparkled and decorated with love and a bit of exhaustion. Can't say I was sad to see the last of the icing, I was well and truly over it by the end! We celebrated the end of the night with a trip to the pub, a few well deserved pints and some great food.
 
Injure-bread men sure do get harder to
ice after a few glasses of wine
 
Bake sale day! With London putting on some spectacularly hideous weather of late, all we wanted was it not to rain. Grey skies was fine, cold weather in Spring was also ok, just no rain! Amazingly, our wishes were granted and the entire day was grey, cold and not rainy. We set up our stall (called 'Cupcakes & Pupcakes') nice and early so it felt like we'd been there for ages when I said to J, "We're going to have SO much stuff to take home with us. Look at how many cupcakes we made! Oh gosh, this is going to be a disaster." Only to have J remind me, "The festival started six minutes ago. We've got another five hours to go. We might just be ok."
 
So much to sell. And this wasn't even half of it!

And we were - lamingtons were a hot favourite with most people having no idea what they even were (I know, where have these people BEEN all their lives?!) with the carrot and lemon cakes flying off the table. We had a near disaster when a lady just could not grasp the concept of the pupcakes being for dogs and not for human consumption. As she lifted one to her lips, we both yelled, "NO! DON'T EAT THAT! They're for DOGS!" she finally understood.
 
Cupcakes & Pupcakes - ready for business
 
Our favourite customer was a lovely English gentleman who was working on another stall. He visited us for one lamington. Then returned for another. Then returned for two cupcakes. Then some cookies. Star! And let’s not forget the wonderful ladies who responded to Jen’s twitter post, ‘Just two more lamingtons remain!’ raced over and bought the last two, even after they bought four previously. I hope they tasted ok and they weren’t disappointed!

We left the festival four hours later with just two packets of cookies left. It seemed a bit wrong to stand there for another 45minutes with just four cookies on our giant stall so we upped and left, happy and well and truly baked-out.

If anyone needs us for cake stalls, bakeries, cafes or anything food related, we're your girls, we're both willing to quit our day jobs should the necessity arise.

Edible glitter just made our cakes

Because everyone knows, cupcakes just taste better when they're sparkly.