Just (don't) say "sim"

600 Chevrolet Cupcakes

884 cupcakes baked this week... 200 for the INC fair, 600 for Chevrolet for the AMSOC Gala dinner, and a few orders in between. All out of my little oven and with the help of some fab mummy friends to put the boxes together, I managed to survive having replaced my travelling husband with my super (overtime-overworked) empregada.

So my Brazilian lesson this week was never to do business in Portuguese on the telephone. It was a good reminder that 50% of the time I have no idea what I'm talking about, or what they are talking about! Hah.  I can laugh about it now. We had pencilled in the Chevrolet order a couple of weeks ago and had been chasing the agency for the logo to go on the cupcake. I really wanted a week to prepare the boxes, cut out logos so I could concentrate on the final 24 hours baking cupcakes.

Day 3 before the event I get a phone call to ask if the boxes will be all complete when they arrive, with stickers. I say "SIM", my favourite word which always gets me in trouble here.. They confirm the order. 10 days after my deadline. I don't why I bothered!

Day 2 before the event.. apparently I have said "SIM" to printing and putting Chevy stickers on all the boxes (we had our logo on all the lembracinha* boxes since we were doing this at a special price for our AMSOC friends), and printing and tying tags. I know now what a tag is... but because I had never heard of the word, my brain obviously just ignored it when he mentioned it on the phone the day before. So now I had 48 hours to print, cut, stick and tie their logo and message to my cupcake boxes as well as bake 600 cupcakes!

24 hours before delivering. 600 logos to cut out, 600 tags to cut, 600 ribbons to cut and tie and 600 cupcakes to bake, frost and put the logo on. Tick, tick, tick! Thanks to some friends and some hired help we got it all done with an hour to spare. The evening was a great success; well done to the AMSOC Board! They raised over R46.000 just through the silent auction, the food was delicious and we had great company on the table. I wasn't sure about their DJ selection though...  it was when I was dancing to Boney M at 1am that I thought it would be a good time to leave! I gave my cupcake to my taxi driver - I hope he appreciated all the hard work that went into that little cake!!

*lembrancinhas are little gifts given to everyone as they leave a party. Brazilians give these away at every function, event, party, wedding, birthday, anniversary, new baby event!