From February 15, 2018 until March 15, 2018 I asked people to take part in the coffee invite event. The basic idea was for you to make something from scratch and invite somebody over. There was no give-away. So today the event is over and the question is how it went. The answer is, it was great, yet different than expected. I received a lot of messages of people telling me that they were inspired and that they invited somebody over. I also know that the four guest bloggers Nina, Lisha, Marileen and Lizet invited people over. Usually people would either come over to me and be like “You inspired me, I actually baked something and invited my best friend.” I would then reply: “Wonderful, did you take a picture of it?” And the typical reply was: “Oooops, I forgot.” So unfortunately I don’t have a lot of proof of all these coffee invites. However, people did take part. And that is what counts for me. I didn’t want people to just make a recipe in order to generate clicks, I didn’t want people to bake to post later nice pictures on Instagram, I simply wanted to inspire people to share what they had baked.
So as stated, I don’t have a lot of proof other than messages, but below you will find the pictures that were actually submitted. Some bloggers also took part, so yay! I will still call the event a success. As long as people had fun, as long as they were inspired to make something from scratch, I would say we achieved great. Some people also pointed out to me that I was basically doing this during lent. But seriously, there is more than cake you can make, for example I also have some sugar free muffins on this blog I am sure don’t count as sweets during lent. But whatever, I know for a fact that people did bake and did invite somebody over, that’s all that counts!
My own coffee invite took place here in Hamburg on March 3, 2018. I did take a lot of pictures and I would like to share how it went. Originally eight people were invited, but due to sickness (influenza hit Germany really hard this year) we were only four in the end. I did ask my guests to bring some plastic boxes as we had a lot of leftovers. We had a lot of fun chatting and sharing time. That’s the most important for me, to share and just to spend time together. Of course I could have made only one cake, but since I relax when I bake, I got a little crazy and overdid it, I did five things in total.
So let’s have a look at all the baked goods I prepared for my event. The star of the table was this banana layer cake with brown butter cream. I like that this cake tastes so much like banana. And then this frosting, I made it with brown butter. This means that you melt the butter until it starts smelling nutty and gets a nice chestnut color. This makes such a difference to regular butter. It really makes it taste just a notch better. Divine.
Banana layer cake with brown butter cream
The runner-up was this heart I made according to the new craze of number and letter cakes. I posted the recipe here.
I had the feeling that my guests either got very excited about the banana cake or the heart. I personally loved the heart a lot. It was made with a sponge recipe and my favorite raspberry cream. It is very similar to my beloved strawberry sponge roll. The main difference is that you pipe the dough onto the baking sheet and that you decorate the top layer with flowers and fresh fruits. So adorable!
Apart from the cake, I offered blueberry muffin cookies. I mean, I am known as the cookie monster, so it was very obvious that there had to be cookies. I selected this recipe and another favorite of mine, Nutella chocolate chip cookies. Do you see them on the picture below?
I posted these Nutella chocolate chip cookies very early on on my blog. Simply because they are sooo, sooo good. I can highly recommend them.
Nutella chocolate chip cookies
Last, but not least I offered French macarons. I posted my new favorite recipe here. The filling is raspberry cream und homemade caramel.
My new favorite French macaron recipe
Yes, it was a lot of work. But I did start early, I started a week early and froze a lot of the parts. Did you know for example that macarons freeze beautifully? Especially with no filling. It is so simple, you just take them out and they defrost in about 20min. I can highly recommend doing that.
OK, but now as promised, these were the pictures sent to me from other coffee invites:
Would I repeat this event? Probably, but probably not in the same way. I would definitely keep the spirit of baking and sharing it with others!
No Comments