Charity Breakfast, 3rd year in a row!

When I received the email circular about this year's charity breakfast event, I paused for a moment, closed the email and continued with my work. As much as I would like to continue participating in this event like I did for the past two years, this period of time is extremely busy for me that for that moment when I saw the email, my first thought was "impossible to do it this year lah."

Had my work buddy (who was nominated to be the representative of our department for this year's charity breakfast event) not been persuading me to participate, I would have just gave it a miss this year.

With the support of my good buddy cum baking kaki, Huiqin, we eventually gave it a go again! Timing was bad though, as it was held on a Thursday, which means that we can't have the whole day to prepare like we did last year which was held on a Monday. We applied for half a day off the day before but we didn't have the luxury of time to make as many for sale because I had to "return" the kitchen to her by 4pm on the day of baking so that she can cook and prepare dinner.

We decided brownies as one of our items this year, as it was much easier to make and the baking time for a tray is shorter. We reckon that brownies would not be a good breakfast item, hence our alternative item was sandwiches. As there were other stalls selling sandwiches as well, Huiqin came up with this pizza bread. Althought the taste was good, it would have turned cold by the time we reached the office. A few sample tries for our colleagues indicated that it was not a very welcoming item on the menu.

As we were pondering whether to go ahead with the pizza bread item, this idea suddenly popped up in my head - using my sandwich maker to make toasted sandwich on the spot. My mum have this sandwich maker which my brother won it in a lucky draw many years back. We used it only a few times and it was the best choice for making freshly toasted sandwiches on the spot.

This year, things somehow didn't turn out smoothly as expected. The brownies were a little burnt just because we overlooked by a mere 1-2 minutes and were not in time to tent the top part of the brownie. I managed to salvage it by trimming the burnt portion and frost the top with chocolate icing. (hopefully my colleagues didn't see this!) :P Anyway, I'm not too worried cos' the taste of the brownies was still good.

Another mishap was, on the day of the charity breakfast event, the coordinator missed our stall and we were left with no stall. Anyway, eventually we still managed to share a little space with another colleague and managed to sell all our brownies and sandwiches, thanks to the support of our colleagues. ;)

One really has to put his heart and soul into doing something to make it successful. I thought over and reconciled that this year, somehow I wasn't committed enough to this event whole-heartedly, partly because I did not want to spend too much time on it because it was out of my busy schedule. Yet I still wish to participate because it's a charity event and out of my collesgue's persuasion. It has taught me that if I ever decided on doing something, I must do it WELL, especially if it's baking-related, I do not wish to tarnish my name. :P

Huiqin in action - making sandwiches

I was in charge of toasting the sandwich.

These are truly the experienced cooks and entrepreneurs. :)

Baking for Charity

Last year, my colleague, Huiqin and I participated in our company's Charity Breakfast and this year there we go ahead again! This year, our department changed it to a lunch event. Well, be it breakfast or lunch, our only specialty was bake goods! lol.... Afterall, its a charity event and most importantly its to raise money for charity. We were also expecting our collegues to give us our support. The good thing was we also got to claim time-off because it was a lunch event and we needed time to prepare in the morning. :P

This year, we made cookies, swissrolls, egg tarts and cupcakes. I was too exhausted that I have forgotten to take pictures of the cupcakes I made. The above were double chocolate cookies.

Huiqin baked some egg tarts unfortunately it wasn't a success as she had forgotten she should not poke holes for making egg tarts because fillings had to be poured into the tart shells and by doing so, the tarts got badly burnt. She improvised by making some chocolate tarts instead.

We had lots of fun making and rolling swissrolls at my house. We also took videos how to roll swissrolls but some speech had to be "sensored" so I can't post it here :P

We managed to sell all our goodies! Woo hoo! (In the photo: Me, May Ling, Huiqin).