This past weekend was a blur of Taiwanese spicy beef hand pies, Meyer lemon pudding cakes, chocolate salted caramel trifles, cheddar scallion biscuits, and guava passion cakes…lots of them. You see I decided to hold a virtual bake sale and let’s just the say the response was surprising and overwhelming. It was an idea that I’d been tossing around in my head for months. All it took was a chorus of rather loud, insistent voices encouraging me to finally do it.

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I knew the guava passion cake had a built-in fan based. But who knew people would go bananas over Taiwanese spicy beef pies? It was a last minute addition to the bake sale menu because both my friends Michael and Maria thought I needed another savory option besides the cheddar scallion biscuits.

This bake sale gem was inspired by the Taiwanese Spicy Beef Noodle Soup I made the week before. I had some of leftover tender braised beef sitting in my fridge begging to be repurposed. It occurred to me that if I shredded up the meat, mixed in some chopped scallions and salty pickled mustard greens, then bound everything together with a reduction of the already intensely flavored spicy beef soup base and wrapped the filling in a flaky buttery pastry I’d have something potentially spectacular. Boy, did I ever!

Before I knew it, I was up to my eyeballs in shredded braised beef and pastry dough. Slow cooking enough braised beef to make enough filling for 50+ hefty hand pies turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated–involving 3 large slow cookers and 10 lbs of meat. What the heck did I get myself into?

It was one of those situations where I had to figure out the process to realize my creative vision as I went along–how much cooked filling to pastry dough? As luck would have it, I calculated just the right amount of filing for the exact number of pasty rounds. Because all the bake sale items were pre-ordered, I knew how much of each I needed to produce, so I had very little waste or overage. Hallelujah!

The other surprise hit, which really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise, were my Chocolate-Dipped Hobnobs, which I made several weeks back for my tribute to Killing Eve post. Even my neighbor Jennifer, who wasn’t a fan of oatmeal cookies, became a convert– must have been the rich chocolate coating. They were so popular I ended up baking off a second batch.

What was most gratifying about the bake sale was the sheer enthusiasm of everyone who came by to pick up their orders, some so excited to dig into their treats they were giddy with joy. One lady was literally bouncing up and down, squealing. Who doesn’t like a bake sale? It’s casual, it’s comforting, it’s nostalgic. You never know what you’ll find so there’s that thrill of discovery.

So, as exhausted as I was from working on this bake sale project most of last week, I’m also energized and inspired to do it all again in a couple of weeks. Sure, it’s a creative outlet for me. But more than that, it is who I am. As much as I’ve attempted to transition out of production, to “get out of the kitchen” so to speak, invariable I’m drawn back in. During these often unsettling times, maybe a bake sale is just the thing to spark some joy in all of us.