Hi, everyone!
I’ve been busy helping Grandma with the Election Day Bake Sale at her church! We’ve been collecting baking supplies for almost a month! Grandma has a spreadsheet to figure out what amounts of ingredients to buy. In a presidential election year, those are especially large amounts! I helped Grandma make gluten-free scones to sell at the bake sale. We have to make, package and freeze those in advance so they don’t get any wheat flour on them during baking at church!
Meanwhile, Grandpa was doing more tree pruning work outside. He cut off some low branches with his very long saw. Grandma and I made a stack of them and I helped cut them into lengths that the town would haul away. This is the second big stack for this fall!
Then we went out to Sodus to clear more leaves off the lawn there. Grandma and I took a break to go walking on our driveway. The leaves are very pretty colors now! There are lots of trees down in the woods, too, and some of them were very tall!
Last Saturday, Joe-san and Nancy-san and Moose-san came over to load all the bake sale supplies in Nancy-san’s truck. There was a lot to load! Moose-san and I helped Joe-san get the very last bags into the truck. It was hard work for a little lion and a little moose!
On Sunday people at church helped us unload all the supplies, and on Monday we started baking! It was fun to see so many of my baking buddies again this year! In the morning, we helped make a lot of yeast dough! It takes a while for the dough to rise and get shaped before actual baking begins! Then yummy rolls start coming out of the oven. All the bakers are happy when Grandma declares the first “burnt offering”. That’s usually a tea ring that falls apart when it goes from the cookie sheet to the cooling rack. It’s a warm treat for everybody to share!
By late afternoon, there are lots of goodies out of the oven. That’s also when my chocolate bread and scone kit buddies come to do their favorite, special jobs. The bread that is ready to sell goes upstairs once it’s packaged. Moose-san and I went up to see how much was ready for the sale, and I introduced him to the Jesus doll. The Jesus doll mostly stays in the worship space, so he can keep the bread and rolls company overnight.
It was early Tuesday morning when we got home from baking, but Grandma got me back up before dawn to go back to church. Tuesday morning is scone making time! I saw my scone-making buddy Ann-san again and one of my Ground Hog Day cookie-packing buddies came to make scones, too! Moose-san and I helped Averil-san bake the scones. Don’t they look yummy? Then we helped Grandma deliver the first batch of scones to the sellers upstairs.
Tuesday was a very busy baking day! Everybody worked really hard, but we still ran out of various kinds of treats during the day. Sometimes we had to wait for baking pans to come out of the oven so they could be used again. We used up nine pounds of shortening, just to grease pans! When the election polls closed, there were still fresh goodies coming out of the oven. It’s a good thing we sold enough apple pies so there was room for the extra cinnamon rolls and orange rolls and challah to go into the church freezer!
Yesterday, Grandma and Grandpa started clearing the leaves off the lawn in Fairport. Look at the big leaf pile they made for me! More of the leaves are turning color and falling, but there are still a lot of trees with all their leaves on them. We’re certainly not done clearing leaves at either Sodus or Fairport yet!
Love,
Lion-san
It was good to see everyone that baked, some for the manyth time and some for the first time! We did get a lot baked. I think there will be trees that drop their leaves after we really get snow. It will be hard to get them up then but they will just rot under the snow. Meanwhile Joe-san has to rake leaves for a while.