Cake Wrecks Charity

Our friends at Cake Wrecks, Jen and John, have come up with a wonderful and ingenious way to help over two dozen different charities in the next two weeks-each day, they post a different charity program (to which they are personally giving at least $200 to each, btw!) with a link to it's donation site. They are asking their readers, which are now numbering in the tens of thousands, to each give only $1 per day. Imagine-with 80,000 readers, that's a LOT of dough and a LOT of warm fuzzy feelings! So we wanted to share this amazing event with you- head over to the Cake Wrecks blog, look for the charity information at the bottom of the day's post, (or just head to their Charity Countdown page) and give your dollar. We are sure it'll be the easiest and quickest way to get into the holiday spirit!



Location:New York,United States

Menu for Hope 6

We are so honored to be taking part in the Sixth Annual Menu for Hope, an annual fundraising campaign raising money for the UN World Food Programme, helping to feed hungry people worldwide. WFP is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good.We are so excited to be taking part in this wonderful and unique event-- the Menu for Hope is a collection of bloggers from across the world who donate a wide assortment of food-related goodies, classes, art, or whatever they can think of. The items are then listed on a donation site and the visitors purchase $10 virtual raffle tickets which they can apply to whatever item they choose. At the end of the raffle, all the tickets are tallied and a winner for each item is announced.

The items Jacy Cakes will be providing are four seasonal shipments of a dozen of our large hand-decorated sugar cookies over the course of the upcoming new year, one shipment every three months. Each cookie will be individually bagged and tied with a satin ribbon, ready to enjoy on the spot or give as gifts. Our cookies are made with the highest quality ingredients and are decorated, bagged, and shipped within two days of their baking, and are shipped priority mail overnight to ensure their freshness.  We can offer our traditional sugar cookie as well as a vegan or gluten-free version. These cookies can easily be shipped anywhere across the country.

The Menu for Hope raffle begins on December 14th and ends on December 25th. Keep an eye out for a link to the donation site on December 14, where you can start your raffling engines! If you're already on our mailing list, we will notify you. If you're not, why not go ahead and sign up?

For more information on the Menu for Hope, check out the Chez Pim blog. Remember, any amount you can give will make a difference!!

Cake Wrecks Book Tour- NY stop

Josh & I are really big Cake Wrecks fans and we were beyond excited when it was finally confirmed that we would get the opportunity to make a cake for the NY stop of their book signing "World Tour"! It was such a huge deal for us and so surreal that we would actually be making something that would be on the website we read and enjoy so much. We didn't want to talk about it to too many people, just in case it fell through and we were left crushed. Right up until the moment we were actually there I was still in disbelief that it was happening, but it did! So now we can tell you all the story about the cake we made that we secretly built up in our hearts to be such a huge deal, that ended up being in an actual cake wreck!
So we created this big cake design that had several elements to it and we split up the elements between us to work on separately over the weekend. The theory was that we would join our elements a few hours before the event, airbrush a pearl sheen on it all, take pictures, and be on our way- best laid plans... What ended up happening was so ridiculous! We ended up having to work on our sections basically the night before since we were so busy with other cake orders and only slept a few hours to make sure everything was perfect and detailed. It still wasn't finished, so I went over to our office to meet up with Josh and finish up what was left and move on from there. I arrived in New York four hours early and proceeded to drive around looking for a parking spot - NY parking.....sigh.....

So anyways, after an hour and a quarter tank of gas, I started to cry. Then I drove back to the street of our building and resolved that I would just wait there until someone left. It was just as I turned onto that street that I finally got a spot! But I lost an hour of vital working time so I rushed up the 5 flights of stairs, that's right, 5...flights...of stairs- no elevator- and frantically worked on finishing up everything. We finally finished an hour before the event, which meant we had to airbrush the sheen, take pictures and get going in half an hour in order to get there in time. Any other day that would be no problem, but since we were on such a time crunch, of course, our airbrush gun was clogged and didn't work! I took it apart and quickly cleaned it, but it still didn't work, but if i tilted it in a certain angle, a little bit of pearl would come out, so I was resigned to airbrushing in this crazy angle in triple the time it should have taken!!

We were going to set up the cake for quick pictures, but we had exactly half an hour before the event and we still had to carry this monster of a cake (it ended up being almost 100 lbs!!!) downstairs and into my car. We had to choose between taking pictures and being on time-we chose being on time, and we have officially learned our lesson- we will never ever again not take pictures! The cake was 3 layers of gluten free cake decorated to look like a stack of the Cake Wrecks book. A separate dummy book covered in fondant leaned against the stack with the cover facing the front, & on top of the stack was another dummy cake covered in fondant and decorated with fabric in the colors of the cake wrecks website, with silver flourishing in the middle. All this was on top of a mini table we made to mimic the table the books would be signed on. We also made up a pen with a tiny dangling carrot jockey with the writing "CW 'World' Tour- NY Take Two" on it. We had to split up the different elements of cake & each bring down some of it, but Josh ended up carrying the heaviest part of it down the 5 flights of stairs. By the time we got to the bottom, he looked like he was about to collapse, so I put down my stuff and try to carry his part the rest of the way-- for the first time in my career I wasn't able to carry a cake for more than a minute and it started to drop! So he had to take it back and we got everything loaded. Finally, we were on our way.

Once we got there though, we discovered that 2 table legs had broken off during the trip and the cake had crashed onto the floor of the trunk, slamming the front piece of the cake into the dummy book cover! The fondant table cloth was all over the place, the front piece was missing a chunk - at that moment, all we could do was laugh, take off the remaining table legs and give in to the will of the universe, which was apparently to have a real cake wreck displayed at the Cake Wreck book signing!!

We want to thank the Barnes & Noble staff members that helped Josh carry in the cake the rest of the way while I parked my car, which only took a few minutes that time thank goodness! Thanks to John & Jen Yates for being not only hilariously entertaining but so nice, but for giving us signed copies of the book and of course for giving us this great opportunity!

So now here are the best pictures we have of the night- the only side view picture here was the least blurry one of the bunch, but after carrying that huge cake so long Josh's arms apparently couldn't hold the camera still enough to get a good shot! We're hoping some better pics surface eventually, but I think you get the general idea ;o) There are a few pre-wreck pictures of the dummy cakes, & then the rest were after. Enjoy!

Wii Cake on WiiNoob Blog

We had the immense pleasure of being included in the WiiNoob blog for our Wii cake. WiiNoob is a fantastic blog about not only the Wii system, but practically everything to do with Nintendo--from reviews of new games and accessories to reader-submitted Nintendo art and crafts! It's an amazing blog and we are so excited to be included! Thanks to Eran from WiiNoob for all his amazing work! Check out WiiNoob HERE!