RSPCA Cupcake Day 2019 - Red Velvet Cupcakes and Mars Bar Slice

Today is the official RSPCA Cupcake Day in Australia, to raise money for the work of the RSPCA.  Our work RSPCA Cupcake Day was held on Tuesday last week to accommodate when most people in our team could attend.  In all, with sales on the day and donations, together with donation matching from the RSPCA Cupcake Day official sponsor, we raised a total of $901 for the RSPCA.  Given that we are small in number, I was especially thrilled with this result.

For our RSPCA Cupcake Day morning tea, I made Red Velvet Cupcakes and Mars Bar Slice.


I remade Dorie Greenspan's Melody Cookie dough and used it to make some cat cookies as cupcake toppers:

The eyes of the cats are cachous stuck on with a bit of royal icing.

The cats graced the top of some red velvet cupcakes decorated with cream cheese icing:

I used the Queen Red Velvet Cake recipe online here.  I made the proportion of the recipe suggested by Queen for the cupcakes (~ one third of the full cake recipe), but my experience was that this only made very small cupcakes (patty cake size).  If I was to make these again, I would make a half of the cake recipe instead so that I could make muffin tin sized cupcakes.

Here's a close up of a cupcake:

The beauty of the cupcakes is that they were cheap to make, especially as I had bought cream cheese for the icing on sale.

The third item that I made for our RSPCA Cupcake Sale was Mars Bar Slice, recipe here from Taste.com.au:

I bought that Mars Bars when they were on sale and already had a stash of dark chocolate and Rice Bubbles, which kept the cost of a potentially expensive recipe down to an affordable level.

We had a number of other contributions on the day, including freshly made gluten free pancakes with maple syrup and berries from one of my colleagues:

I thought this was particularly impressive as there was an element of live performance involved.  The warm pancakes were my personal favourite.

Here's a happy snap of some of our bakers:

Everyone seemed happy enough with the range on sale.  A carrot cake was a sell-out.  In addition to the aforementioned items, we had banana muffins, apricot ANZACs, chocolate and zucchini slice and date and berry cake for sale.  We had a few items left over, but sales were good.

That's a wrap for another RSPCA Cupcake Day.  I am not sure if I will organise it again next year because there was an unfortunate level of pressuring from a call centre to be involved this year, even though I had already registered.  However, I am happy to have participated this year to support a very good cause in the work that the RSPCA does to fight animal cruelty.