Austin Bakes for Japan - Success!

You guys! I had so much fun donating my amateur baking skillz to the Austin Bakes for Japan bake sale. I baked Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Cupcakes with a buttercreamy (super creamy!) vanilla frosting. Since baked goods needed to be individually packaged, I ventured out to Hobby Lobby the night before and found these sweet little plastic ice cream dishes. Put two of them together, and voila! A perfect, cupcake-sized package. (Major credit to Kathryn for pointing me to the cup-on-cup idea! Um, and OH YEAH, for organizing the whole bake sale shebang! She's seriously awesome.) If you look really closely, you can see the awesomely not-horrible, hand drawn Texanthropology logo I got a while back from Horrible Logos for 5 bucks. (FIVE BUCKS!)

Some cupcakes before they went into their packaging. I like to squish down the raspberries a touch so they look like little hearts. (Don't worry, I definitely washed my hands so no boogers got on them.)

This baker's slogan is "Come and bake it," which is an adorable nod to Texas history and makes me believe that I should probably be friends with these people. Our shared interests are baking and Texanthropology, after all!

Look how much awesome baked goodness! Guess how much the five different bake sale locations raised. Guess.

Austin Bakes for Japan raised more than $11,000 for AmeriCares' efforts in Japan! WHAT! Crazyawesometown, right?! Go team!

P.S. You can still donate! Go here.

P.P.S. It got super hot that day, and when I went back later to check on how the sale was going, I saw that all that creamy frosting had melted flat onto my cupcakes, and the raspberries were sliding forlornly down the side. Le sigh.

P.P.P.S. BUT! Apparently people continued to buy them anyway! Also, my neighbor had no idea the cupcakes were by moi, but she purchased one for a whopping $5 donation 'cause she thought they were so purty. AW!