Very soon, the Ladies Auxiliary to the Boalsburg Fire Company will hold their fall “flea market/bake sale” at the fire hall. It will be held next weekend, September 19 and 20, 2025.
In the past, I have posted pictures about the flea market-style sale, with almost 30 tables rented by local folks to sell their own stuff. It’s also a major fund raiser for the Auxiliary, with most of the proceeds going to the needs of the fire company. You can see more pictures of one of the last sales we had at: https://marykisner.com/spring-flea-market-will-be-held-april-26-&-27/
In the past year or so, we’ve tried to better organize the bake sale. Honestly, we are not experts at baking, packaging or labeling food products…but we’re getting there. We are a small group of mostly older retired ladies and many of us have stopped doing a lot of baking in the first place. Some of us have moved to apartments or assisted living and don’t have a lot of pots and pans around anymore.
For now, we manage to sell bowls of chicken corn soup, hot dogs and sloppy joe…mostly to the 30+ folks that are taking care of their flea market tables. The baked goods are a draw to go with the lunch fare. However, our offerings have been very limited. This fall, I wanted to try to entice my fellow auxiliary members to expand our offerings at the bake sale table.
My contributions seem to be the chicken corn soup and scones. The soup was easy, but I tackled the scones last year without knowing much about making them. I simplified the process by buying boxed mixes for scones from King Arthur Flour Company…online. You can read about the learning curve I went through to make a ton of scones at https://marykisner.com/making-scones/. At that time, I didn’t realize my oven was not very accurate with preheating so the whole process was quite an accomplishment. I also finally discovered silicone scone baking pans and what a difference they made! I can cool the scones right in the pan and pop them out after they cool and firm up.
Even with the steep learning curve, the scones were a big HIT! That was great, but this fall we needed other items to make it an interesting bake sale. I wanted to encourage my auxiliary friends to each make something to contribute to the sale. I started at the grocery store. I stocked up on a few cake mixes that could be made into cookies.
I found a recipe online to make cookies from a cake mix:
I found some muffin mixes that could be packaged with 2 muffins in a ziplock bag for sale.
I picked up a few disposable cake and bread pans.
I hauled all this stuff to our meeting yesterday and offered the mixes, pans and recipe to the group. I think it worked! At least everybody took at least one thing to try and the pans were helpful for those who no longer had baking pans around. I’m encouraged that we may have more items to sell next weekend! I hope I’ll be able to report that we had a nice variety of baked goods to offer next weekend!
If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.