It's A Fine Line

or Fundraising vs. Extortion

This week Cameron and I participated in his Cub Scout pack's Dad/Lad Cake Bake and Auction. Here's how it works: A theme is selected, and everybody bakes cakes that reflect that theme. (The cakes are supposed to be made by the father and son with No Female Assistance - we did pretty well on that count but I did gratefully accept some help from Katy with the crumb coat and some of the fine frosting details.) Anyway, you bring the cakes, they do a little light-duty judging and prize awarding, and then the cakes are auctioned off. Generally people seem to buy back their own cakes.

Cameron designed a circus-tent shaped cake on paper and we figured out how to realize it in cake form:

We used two sheet cakes, a three-pound bag of M&Ms (sorted by color), a box of fruit rollups, and four cans of frosting. Note the M&M tent stripes, the fruit rollup flags and tent flaps, and the frosting clown/juggler juggling M&Ms inside the entry.

The auction started after our regular pack meeting. Most of the cakes seemed to be going in the $70 range, with rare forays into the $100 range. We bid on a couple cakes to help keep things moving but I had my eye on getting our cake back - I kind of thought that was the point.

Our cake was the next-to-last one auctioned. I waited to enter the bidding until it got to $70. Soon I was bidding $80. Then $90.

We broke the $100 barrier and bids started going up in $10 increments. I bid $110. The other guy went to $120.

In an attempt to shut the other guy down I overbid: $150.

It didn't work. He went to $160. At this point Katy was completely flabbergasted. Cameron was starting to get upset that we weren't going to get our cake back.

What could I do? I can't disappoint the boy. $170.

Quickly the $180 comes back.

I go to $190.

There was a long pause while the Cubmaster tried to get the other guy to answer the bid. Finally (!) I was the proud owner of my own cake, to the tune of $190. Ack!

I have to admit I was a little angry at this point, and I'm sure it showed. Cameron took one look at me and said "I'm sorry daddy." Oh man, now I'm out $190 and I feel like a total crumb. I gave him a hug and told him not to worry about it. "Look at it this way," I said. "You just helped raise $190 for your pack!"

I wrote the check quickly, before the shock wore off.

In the end, I'm not really angry - the pack only does two fundraisers a year, so it's not like we're getting hit up all the time - but I was definitely surprised. We ended up having the second-highest priced cake, behind only the Cubmaster's, which was about the size of a card table and went for $200.