A Sweet Memory: Elementary School Cupcake Sales!

Every image from our childhood is recorded deep within the recesses of our minds.

Unexpectedly, something can jog our memory of a specific event and once again, it becomes clear and vivid. That happened to me yesterday.

A very dear, generous, and spirited blogger, Mo, from Phoenix, Arizona, creates stunning graphics and offers them to other bloggers to use. She is a professional designer. Yesterday’s sweet graphic happened to be a cupcake!

Not only was it love at first sight, the graphic jogged my memory of cupcake sales in a small elementary school in a Western  Massachusetts town. (The old brick school building still stands but its halls no longer echo the sounds of childrens’ laughter since the building is now used for rental units.)

How often the cupcake sales took place, I do not remember. The events, themselves, are lodged clearly in my most pleasant memories of elementary school. Mothers of the students made oodles of cupcakes on the day of a sale.

The students brought the baked goods into school, carrying them like the treasures they were. Some mothers went all out and decorated the cupcakes to the hilt with candies, sprinkles, lolly pops, multi-colored frosting, and so on.

The hundreds of cupcakes got set up on long wooden tables in the school’s hallways. Room by room, teachers led their students to the sale, where we ogled and surveyed the booty. Can you imagine the immense task of a child trying to select just one cupcake out of a sea of sweet frosted beauties?

Each child paid a quarter a cupcake. On the rare occasions there were leftovers, we got to do a second round of cupcake selection, so I was sure to always bring two quarters to school on cupcake sale days.

Even then, teachers were worth their weight in gold. If a kid forgot his or her quarter, or didn’t have one to begin with, the teachers always had extra quarters in their pockets and distributed them accordingly. It was the early version of no child left behind or, no child left without a cupcake!

So to Mo, the professional decorator blogger in Arizona, I say, “Thanks for the memories.”

(P.S. The photographs of cupcakes shown in this post did not come from some old album of long ago cupcake sales. They were snapped surreptitiously at a Big Y supermarket! That's a big supermarket chain in the east.

       If you want a unique experience, try snapping shots of cupcakes in a busy supermarket while trying to be inconspicuous.  After that rather stressful experience, I really yearned for one of those cupcakes as a reward for sleuth duty!

     I think the Elmo, Sponge Bob, and Spider Man  cupcakes look fabulous, don't you?

      Thanks Big Y bakers for making such decorative, delicious cupcakes and for not kicking out the lady snapping pictures of them.)