Tuesday, March 25, 2014 – The Charity Bake Sale, Spring 2014 Edition just ended. This year, we had 28 volunteer bakers, 16 volunteer sellers, 4 Varzea volunteers, and 1 poster designer. We raised a grand total of $2190, beating our previous record of $2158. The proceeds are being split between Seattle Humane Society and Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Apparently, I’ve never explained the Bake Sale on the blog before. It all started in 2013, when I discovered there was no baking interest group at Amazon. So I started the Bakers @ Amazon group. And then I decided, let’s do something with this, let’s have a bake sale. And thus, the Amazon Bake Sale for Charity was born. Our first Bake Sale was in February 2013, raising $2080.45. Our second Bake Sale was in September 2013, raising $2158. We hope to do another one near the end of summer.
So for my special treat this year, I decided to make extra large, eggless, double chocolate chip cookies. Why extra large? One of the complications of the bake sale is that everything is differently sized. Previously, we had a pricing model where “large items” where $2 and “small items” were $1. Except things got wonky because no one was sure what was a large item and what was a small item. So this year, we decided to institute a flat pricing model of $2 per item, and try to standardize portion sizes so everything was roughly the same portion size as a cupcake.
I arbitrarily decided that a 3 Tbsp (4.5-inch) cookie was comparable to a cupcake. Smaller cookies would be packaged 2 (or 3) to a package and be sold as one “item”. (Labor intensive items like cake pops would still count as “one item”.)
Of course, this presented a problem for me, since I wanted my cookies to individually be comparable to a cupcake, but I’ve always baked smaller, 1.5 Tbsp, 3-inch cookies. The very first batch of cookies I baked were “extra large”, but were underbaked and fell apart, so I needed to relearn the proper timing to make sure these cookies worked.
Friday, January 24, 2014 – Long story short, it worked. Same recipe, same baking temperature, slightly longer baking times. Cookies cook from the outside in, so they’re normally expected to be crispy on the edges and soft in the middle. But for a larger cookie, this was more pronounced. The crust on the outside was crispier, and the soft center was even softer than usual (especially noticeable when fresh out of the oven). But overall, I think the cookies were baked just right.
But wait, I said eggless double chocolate chip! That’s not what the picture shows! I had originally planned on extra large size normal chocolate chip cookies, but I decided to kick it up a notch and make it a double chocolate chip. And eggless too, since there were lots of requests for vegan and gluten-free. (Although eggless is neither, it’s the closest thing. And some people can’t have eggs, so…)
Sunday, February 9, 2014 – I added the cocoa powder and substituted the eggs with 100g milk. But milk-based cookies add a lot more moisture to the cookie with a lot less protein to bind the cookie together. I made the mistake of keeping the same baking time as the egg cookies (12 min). And the cookies were too soft and fell apart. You see that picture above where I have half a cookie with a bite taken out of it? Yeah, that was entirely unintentional. I meant to present a whole cookie (with a bite taken out of it), but the cookie fell apart literally as I was taking the photo.
Sunday, March 9, 2014 – Now that’s more like it. I increased the baking time to 14 minutes, and the cookies came out perfectly. Still, like I said, the edge was extra crispy, and the middle was extra soft, but that’s generally not a problem.
I brought these cookies to the cake class at Sizzleworks, and the class loved it. A few people (including one of the assistants) asked me for the recipe.
Sunday, March 23, 2014 – No changes to the recipe. Last time was a practice run. Today was the real thing. I made 42 cookies over 2 days and packages them individually and boxed them up.
My friend Ash made chocolate cayenne cookies. She intended to make a vegan cookie, but ran out of flax eggs, so she had to use real eggs. I tried a couple. The flavor is very complex and multi-layered. First, I tasted the flax. Then, I tasted the chocolate. Finally, the cayenne kicked in and I felt the heat. As I was bagging them, I counted 116 in total. (Packed into bags of 3. I ate 2 of them.)
So the opener pic was the Port 99 location. We also had a Van Vorst location, shown just above. (If you’re not an Amazonian and don’t know what the names mean, don’t worry about it.) As you can see, we have tables and tables full of food. Four tables at each location, packed relatively dense. And we had different volunteers taking care of the organizational details, so you can really see their differing organizational styles. (Both of them were very well organized though.)
The best selling item though?
