Online Bake Sale....

I've been going back and forth on this blog post for a little while now. I don't really like asking for help and would much rather tackle something myself first, but this is a very special occasion where I need some help. My six-year-old daughter has had Type 1 Diabetes since she was three. Now at the age of six she continues to grow and thrive faster than I want her to, living every day with the 24-hour maintenance Type 1 demands. Every year in November my family and I and a bunch of other fantastic friends take part in a 5K fundraising walk at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. Our main goal is to raise as much money as we can for Team Miranda and The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, with the expectation of finding a cure for Miranda and all of the other people with T1D.

I would like to host an on-line bake sale and am asking  my blogger friends, foodies and non foodies to volunteer to put up one of your special recipes for auction. I realize life for everyone is very busy nowadays, myself included, but it could be a simple baked good or even a piece of baking equipment, if baking is not your best talent. If you are interested in taking part in this event I would need you to do the following:

• Send me a recipe with a picture (we eat with our eyes) and a link to your blog - after all, you deserve the extra traffic I hope to generate. I will display all of the goodies in a new post just before the auction goes live.
• Commit to baking the product within 3-5 days of the winning bid being paid into our team's fundraising page, I will notify you when that happens.
• Ship the goodies to the winning bidder - you can choose to ship only in the U.S or Canada or even internationally.

After the auction is over, I will do a follow-up blog post highlighting all of the blogs which took part and making sure everyone gets the credit they deserve. I look at blogs everyday and the recipes I see look fantastic and I know how much of a community blogging has turned into and how proud we all are of our posts. Foodness Gracious is only eight months old, but in that short space of time I feel a great connection to many of you out there. Yesterday I attended my first blog conference at Blog Sugar - one of the organizers, Andrea of Four Flights of Fancy, is a good friend of mine and even though it wasn't a food bloggers event, I still managed to see the happiness in many of the bloggers faces and feel the excitement in the room just because these people had came from all over the virtual world and were actually talking to each other without a keyboard in front of them. Bloggers are tight and I wish I could have a food-based blog conference so I could meet all of you in person...that would be awesome.

If you would like to help myself and Team Miranda please email me at gerryspeirs@hotmail.com, by October 3, preferably with your recipe choice. The auction will take place on October 6th and end on October 10th. I would also like to mention Steph at Stephsbitebybite.com. She has done a few of these sales and I scoured her blog for advice and inspiration.

Thanks everyone....