Saturday, December 3, 2011

Give-Away Bake Sale

Every year, for the past five years, I've baked pies for the Cub Scout bake sale at the Chief Kanim Holiday Bazaar.  The bazaar has a surprising number of interesting booths including felted art, hand-painted Santa ornaments on oyster shells, wreaths, amazing cakes, and live music.  I didn't get all the way around this morning after I dropped off my pies, but one booth was selling knitted Viking helmets!  Oh I wanted one of those, but knew I'd never have the courage to actually wear it.  I'm just not one of those people who likes to be out on the edge with anything, let alone fashion.

Last year, I worked in my kitchen all day on the Friday before the sale and made eleven pies. I even made a lemon meringue which sold for $14 within five minutes of its arrival at the bake sale.  By myself, I brought in $124 dollars for the Cub Scouts and got kudos for my pie.  I like making pie.  After working at the bake sale table for a while that year, I had discovered that some people had bought cookies and repackaged them for the bake sale.  Oh, that made me mad.  I mean, why bother?  I would hate to buy something at a bake sale and realize in the first bite that it wasn't even homemade. 

This year, I was feeling bad because I only had time to make four large pies and three single-serving ones.  I worried, as usual, about handling food for sale to the public.  I wash my hands a bunch and tried to follow the rules I learned when I got my food handler's permit.  In the end, my pies looked good and I hauled them to the bake sale early this morning, wrapped, labeled and priced. 

Every other year, we've charged $10 apiece for a whole pie except the lemon meringue.  I only asked them to charge more for that because it's so labor intensive to make.  So when I labeled my pies, I priced them the same way we always did.  I have to tell you that I buy quality ingredients for my pies, fresh lemons, organic King Arthur pastry flour, a variety of crisp apples, organic eggs.  I make for other people what I would serve to my own family.

So, as I was walking away from the bake sale table, someone dropped a tray of baked goods, including one of my pies.  Then, someone else was using her fingernails to try to lift off a label I'd put onto a pie.  I paused to see what was up.

"Oh, we're pricing all the pies the same," she said, smiling up at me.

"How much?" I asked.

"Five dollars," she said as she went on with her fingernail scraping.  Oh man, I was speechless.  I ended the conversation, tried to keep a smile on my face, and left.  I can't even gather the ingredients for a pie for $5.00.  I roll out my own pastry, chop up my own fruit, sometimes using berries I've picked and frozen in the summer.  It's a labor of love.  This year, I used canned cherries and was feeling bad about the short cut.  Now, I won't worry about it for a minute.  This year, making pie was a labor of love handed out for free.

Thank you for listening, jb

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