Fundraising for the Floods

The last few weeks the Cake Gossip group has been busy with baking cupcakes, we baked 450 +
Jen Yap, Jenny and Hannah Wegner,Kellie  and Sarah Ivory and Tiffanee and Brittany  Coombes and Adam my handsome son ( he never reads my blogs anyway!) all mixed, spooned, baked and decorated one way or another beautiful rainbow swirls of cupcakes.
We then delivered them direct to some of the flood victims that were being housed temporarily at Warwick show ground at Ipswich.The weather was lovely as we left Daisy Hill but as we got closer we had  torrential rain , strong winds and as we approached Ipswich  a storm came through and our visibility to drive the cars was almost nil. We stopped several times as the roads had huge pot holes and I could not see the road markings! We eventually found the venue and delivered all the cupcakes and  I realised then we were just scratching the surface of this huge life altering terrible experience to the families we saw.


We all wanted to help directly again so we put our ideas together and Tiffanee and Jenny thought about baking and selling cupcakes to local businesses.We then realised some businesses in fact all businesses have been affected in some way and so this might be putting more strain on them, by phoning around and asking them to buy the cupcakes, so we thought about having a cupcake stall, I mean how hard can this be with the amount of sausage sizzles every weekend at lots of stores?

Well our first  point of call was at our local shopping centres.The cake gossip group are all cake makers based in  and around Springwood, Beenleigh,Shailer park and southside of Brisbane.
So we called the Logan Hyperdome shopping centre and  Springwood Centro shopping centre and they all said no as it was a  conflict of interests as they had cupcake, cake shops and cafes.

I contacted Harvey Norman and they said yes as did  Officeworks and eventually Bunnings agreed but we were looking for a busy indoor and air conditioned place( because of the cakes !) okay because we wanted to be cool!

Then I thought of contacting my  favourite store Ikea ( who are not my favourite store now!) and they said no as they have allready helped  with donations.

Kellie contacted Riverlink Shopping centre at Ipswich , which had been flooded and  was under water, less than 2 weeks ago and yet was having a fund raising day with facepainting and activities and said a big Yes to us Wahooooo! With a bit of paperwork and uping my public liability to 20 million its easier to write the number  then work out all the zeros! we had a venue! and yes they have coffe shops, cake stores and cafes too!


So On Friday Jenny turned up at 7.30am ( for those who know me I do not do early mornings and yes I know half of Australia have allready been awake for a few hours! I am more of a night owl! ) (That was a hoot!) and we got making the cupcakes and with a production line of baking and then Kellie and Jen arrived after the school run we went into baking and decorating mode. We spend almost the whole day and by 4pm the cupcakes were all boxed up ready for the next day. We made vanilla cupcakes and chocolate chip.

Albert and Logan came out to write about what we were doing and take a photo see link below

Click Here for paper article

A BIG Thank You.

We had donations of beautiful cupcake boxes from http://www.packagingplace.com.au/ thank you to Gary and his wife for delivering and donating them.( They are relocating to bigger and better premises which is great news.)
and our donation of yummy chocolate from Jimele  http://www.jimele.com.au/

Driving through Ipswich it still looked  like they had a lot more cleaning and repairs  to do and you could see the level where the water had risen.We arrived at 8.30am Riverlink Shopping centre, the escalators were still not working or the lifts and my husband Matt and son Adam and I were met with a lovely warm welcome from one of the security girls( must have been all the boxes of cupcakes?) and we met with the other girls, Jenny and her husband Lindsay  Kellie and her husband Don and daughter Sarah, we all  got busy setting up the tables.What beautiful cupcakes and they all sold within 2 hours.We raised $1220 what a beautiful result.

We met  lots of people that were blown away, when they found out that we had travelled from Springwood to help raise funds and it was going direct to the flood affected.We explained all our local shopping centres could not help and so we called further afield and we were all very pleased to help.

This shopping centre had been under water, the town and it surrounding areas flooded and yet a few weeks later was fundraising! and all the local residents came out to support this and they themselves had been terribly affected and so  it was really good to be a  part of that.

Today Kellie and I went and purchased with the money raised, 3 lovely fridge freezers for the Lockyer Valley flood victims, from our cupcake fundraiser on Saturday. They will be delivered to the families free of charge from The Good Guys.


What can I do next?

I am planning on a cake decorating fundraiser so that we can all meet up raise money and further our cake decorating skills all in one day and  meet with other like minded cake decorators. All monies will go to the flood appeal, not just a percentage but 100% I will be posting more info soon on this blog and on facebook.

 I like this quote I read recently  "Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone else's life forever."


Have a good week xxxx