A Follow Up and Bake For the Quake Vancouver

First of all, I wanted to thank all of you for the completely unexpected response to my post on food photography being in a rut.  It caught me off guard and I obviously hit a nerve.  Thank you so much for your positive and thoughtful feedback and conversation.  I’ve tried to respond to each of you in the comments and I’m tickled to hear that so many of you are going to get back to your roots and embrace why you started blogging in the first place.  The world needs diversity so never be afraid to do your own thing, even if it doesn’t fit into the current mold!

It helped me reaffirm my decision to take more of the kind of photos I love and also to keep offering up some photo tips specific to food bloggers that don’t require lots of money or fancy setups.  So many of you said how you were working hard to improve so, I’ll do my best to keep that up 😉

On another note, I didn’t respond earlier because I’ve been swamped with work but also because me and my wonderful friend Eleanore were too busy getting ready for Vancouver’s Bake for the Quake, which was yesterday.  We whipped up some Toasted Coconut Toffee Chocolate Cookies, Rocky Road Bars, Salted Caramel Cookies and Rum Balls and managed to bring in close to $240 for Doctors Without Borders and their relief efforts in Japan.

They’re still tallying up the totals but with the lineup just to get in the door being nearly 45 minutes long, I think it’s safe to say the event did really, really well! We sold out of salted caramel cookies and rocky road bars before the night was over and took home a few straggly rum balls and coconut cookies (I ate a few in the car on the way home – what can I say? It was dinner.)

I can’t believe how many people were there – it was jam packed from start to finish and we even had Bif  Naked stop by our booth and say hello.  Cool beans!  Thanks so much to lovely Elle for all her help getting goodies ready and keeping me company last night – it was fun to spend some time with you lady!  You can see our hands holding some goodies in the official photos.  We’re in there somewhere.  That’s Elle’s hands holding the rocky road bars and mine holding the rum balls.

And check out the wonderful Canucks Cupcakes our tablemate Candace, from Baked in Vancouver made – we’re pretty sure that all the people buying them have brought good Canucks karma for tonight’s game 5 against Chicago.

Thanks to Melody from gourmetfury and Joy from gourmeted and all their fantastic volunteers for putting together such a great event so quickly and of course, special thanks to everyone who came and supported it and took away some yummy and beautiful treats!  What a great event for a great cause!