Post bake sale... post

So after all that baking, baking...and more baking, and spending the better part of the day in San Francisco, what were the results of the bake sale? We were able to raise a whopping $2400 for the Share Our Strength charity. Well, that's at least one less kid going hungry for today. And what about childhood obesity and diabetes, you ask? I'll have to save those causes for another day.

For the bake sale, I made French macarons, a fraisier, and madeleines. Though I didn't stay for the entire time, I did get to witness my cake getting sold off to a nice gentleman who purchased it for his mother's 92nd birthday!

It was quite a bit of work packaging everything up late on Friday evening, but luckily I had some friends stop by to give me a hand.

What do you guys think about the artwork? Many thanks to my brother for helping me out with the design, even though it required a fair amount of bartering and pleading. Overall, it was a pretty fun event. I met a lot of other food bloggers and was quite impressed at what some people can crank out.

I was particularly pleased at how my macarons came out. I've nearly perfected making them in the U.S. Making them back in France seemed fool-proof with high-quality fine almond meal and ovens that weren't so finicky. Yes, whenever there is a baking mishap, I will ALWAYS blame the oven. As I write this post, I'm putting another batch of macarons in the oven, and am happy to say that I've tamed the oven beast. Though macarons are super labor intensive, they sure are pretty.

Unfortunately I had to throw away over half of the macaron shells I made for the bake sale. They didn't have the perfect 'foot', but I think I've managed to figure out how to get them to rise evenly in the oven.