Selling Cakes to Mountain Bikers!

This was the scene down at the Rec last weekend. There were several hundred mountain bikers camping on the field. They disappeared during the day to pedal up hills but returned in the evenings to be fed and watered.


This is the team selling on the Sunday. There was a different crew on the Saturday and I'm afraid we didn't gather photographic evidence of them!



And me in this one..

The goodies!! We had sold a lot by then so most of the more spectacular creations had already gone

And a reminder of why we're doing all this. The play area was looking a bit sorry for itself. There was lots of kids camping on the Rec and seeking entertainment while their dads biked - how much better it would have been for them to have a decent play area to run riot in!

This fund raising business leads you down strange roads indeed. Having heard about our need to raise money, one of the organisers of the Polaris Challenge Mountain Bike Weekend on Bamford Rec last weekend asked if our group would like to (wo)man a refreshment stall selling tea/coffee, cold drinks, snacks and homemade cakes to the hungry and thirsty bikers on their return from the hills.

We took up the challenge, swung the mothers, grandmothers and assorted other women (and maybe a few blokes) of Bamford into action baking and set up our stall on the Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon selling. By Sunday evening we were getting pretty good at shifting the merchandise too as we squeezed the last few coins out of those hapless bikers' pockets!

For a woman on a diet, it was a pretty hard task! We were surrounded by tables groaning under the weight of homemade goodies - lemon drizzles, carrot cakes, parkins, oaties, fruit cakes, victoria sponges, muffins, flapjacks, chocolate brownies and many, many more! It was as though a battalion of WI fanatics had gone cake crazy! For balance we did include some fruit etc but I notice that the gooey-er and more calorific a cake was, the quicker it was snapped up. I suppose they had been cycling in the hills for hours so they deserved a few treats!

The generosity of all those women in giving their time and money to bake all those cakes just shows how important they think a new play area is. You don't spend valuable time and grocery money cooking for something you don't care about.

We would like to thank everyone who donated baked goods to sell. You efforts are much appreciated and are going to a really worthy cause.

Still, I think the bikers appreciated it and we managed to raise in the region of £650 for the cause. The weather was lovely too.

As a general update, we're currently awaiting the results of our planning application and should hear by mid-July. once we receive the planning permision (note my confidence) we'll be able to power ahead with the Grant Application. Keep some fingers crossed for us.