No Woes with Cupcake Wars

January 12th (Cupcake Wars) was a fun day -- leading up to it, however, took a lot of work!

I first began advertising this program in December on our library's Facebook. Almost instantly I had 28 people interested. As I'm only one person, the thought of 28 people coming to a program was terrifying in every possible way. I took a breath and told myself to worry about it closer to program time.

Plus, these things are better when you take them one step at a time, right? Right.

My first thought was cupcakes. I had no idea how I was going to bake 30+ cupcakes (if that's how many were actually showing up). I am a TERRIBLE cook and baker, so the thought of burning them to a crisp two days before my program was haunting my dreams. Instead, I decided to try to ask for donations. In the town I work, we have a few major grocery/bakery chains. Stop and Shop were by far the nicest and easiest to work with, offering me not only 30 vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, but $10 extra dollars for whatever I needed.

Needless to say, I was thankful and impressed. The extra $10 bought me some extra frosting.

Ingredients strewn across the table.

Next I had to decide what I wanted to include for the challenge. For those who don't know, Cupcake Wars is a challenge where contestants build cupcakes using particular ingredients. The library's version was a little simpler -- it was more about impressing the judges with design than taste (none of my judges were into tasting the cupcakes, anyway).

I wanted to use ingredients I knew they'd wrinkle their noses at, while at the same time not making it too much like a Fear Factor challenge.

The two oddball ingredients were maple syrup and canned cheese. Not popular but it was fun to see their reactions.

After a trip to three stores, I had everything I needed, plus extra left over from other programs.

Table set up at the front of the room for ingredients.

Set up was easy -- my library has a decent sized programming room which gave me the opportunity to have a judges table, an ingredient table, and two tables for kids to work at. I bowled up the ingredients and used spoons so they wouldn't touch the food (spoiler alert: they did it anyway). The icing was bagged individually. Each container of frosting made around five sandwich bags of frosting. This was something I was certainly proud of, considering my mess that was edible slime (I shudder at the thought of scrubbing the carpets). All the kids had to do was cut the tip off and TA-DA, instant piping bag.

The program itself was great. The prep was what took me forever as just a single person. Next time I do an in-depth program such as this, I'm going to need another person. Mental note taken.

(All my worrying was worthless, by the way. 28 people didn't show up. 6 girls did. All of which had zero food allergies. When I have a food program with registration involved (and most of my food programs involve a registration online), I always ask this important question: "Are you allergic to anything?". It's, to me, the most important question. I'd never want to turn a kid away because he couldn't be in the same room as a jar of peanut butter. However, it's super appreciated that a parent not sign up a child with an allergy the day before. I like to prep as best as I can to cater to kids. I called everywhere to find a place that would do a peanut-free cupcake, and nobody could help me out. It wasn't a problem, because as I stated before, everyone was food allergy free, but I had a very annoying moment of anxiety that I'd ruin a kids evening.)

Getting to work on their creations!

ANYWAY, the theme of the program was books, video games, graphic novels, or any materials you can borrow at our library. This was vague, but shockingly all of the kids did very different things. They had 30 minutes to impress the judges. When the first 15 minutes hit, I paused the timer and told them they needed to decorate an extra cupcake which represents the library itself. (If I had 28 kids show up, I wouldn't have done this... but I figured 6 kids in 3 groups ... I sort of needed to get rid of all the cupcakes I had without eating them myself).

The creations were fantastic. My three judges (our Director, the Supervisor of the Children's Department, and one of our Pages) had a really tough time deliberating which they were going to choose. I'd had the kids vote (two votes: one of which could go to themselves) but it was a 3 way tie (go figure).

The group that won got a small cake and a $15 iTunes gift card.

1st place winners: Library by the Beach.

This program costed me almost $100 dollars.

There were little things I could have done to make it cheaper, but I had the budget money and I knew that this would be a hit. You're probably thinking that 6 kids isn't really a hit... but let me tell you, friend, having 6 ecstatic tweens at any of my programs is a HUGE hit. I also don't bring many outside performers into my programming -- if I can do it myself, I will. And I do it as big as I can. Plus, anything extra that I didn't open goes into my programming stock pile.

I'm a low budget librarian working with a big budget. Something I'm not used to.

Anyway, there it is. Cupcake Wars. Not as messy as edible slime (ughhh) but still kinda messy and a while lot of fun.


Thank you to The Show Me Librarian for making a post about their Cupcake Wars program! It was extremely helpful. You can find it here.