We certainly had a busy weekend… busy but exciting, thanks to the Celcom Baking Workshop held at The Cooking House on Saturday. Cooking classes and challenges I have attended a few but this Celcom event must surely be one of the largest I’ve been! The hands-on fun-filled session saw around 50 participants from popular Malaysian blogs and media publications getting real busy learning the basics of baking and cake decorating with a patriotic twist – and also the opportunity to submit their creations to the Celcom Cupcake Challenge Facebook page as their own entries!
So, what is this Celcom Cupcake Challenge all about?
Well, in conjunction with our country’s 55th anniversary of independence recently and the upcoming Malaysia Day celebrations on 16 September, Celcom is organizing this fun contest as a chance to showcase patriotism and creative skills. The simple online contest challenges Malaysians to submit photos of their creative cupcake designs – yes, as simple as that!
En Zalman Aefendy Zainal Abidin, Chief Marketing Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad informed that “Celcom is opening this contest to all Malaysians, not just Celcom customers. We chose Facebook as the contest channel so that even more Malaysians can come together, share their love for the country and experience the power of personal connections even while at different corners of our beautiful nation.”
Left: En Zalman Aefendy Zainal Abidin, Chief Marketing Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad; right: participants of the Celcom Baking Workshop
When we stepped into The Cooking House, rows of tables have been arranged with all the ingredients measured and laid out for the participants. The class was hosted by Lu Soo Chee, their resident cake artist who is a member of ICES (International Cake Exploration Societe) and the British Sugar-craft Guild. Soo Chee has more than 10 years of baking and cake decorating experience and has worked with professionals around the world.
Once the briefing was over, everyone got busy with the cake baking. The fun part, but definitely hard work here was that the cake making process was done manually… there was no electric cake beaters/mixers provided! We all had to beat the cake batter by hand, using wooden spoons. Some of us had to exert extra energy as the butter was a bit hard but once it got going, it was exciting to see the cake batter forming nicely. Beat butter with sugar, add in the eggs, beat some more to combine and then fold in the flour carefully…ta daaa, batter is ready!
Once the cupcakes were in the oven baking, it was time to make the buttercream. We were shown a sample platter of cupcakes forming the Jalur Gemilang, so we got busy making and colouring batches of the buttercream red, yellow and blue and kept one batch in its original creamy white shade.
The participants let their creative juices run freely and came up with many different variations of the Malaysian Flag theme, as you can see here…
OK, coming back to the online contest, it’s really easy peasy!
To participate in the Celcom Cupcake Challenge, all you have to do is design a cupcake with your own creative interpretation of national pride and upload the photo to www.facebook.com/cupcakeschallenge and you will be in the running to win prizes worth more than RM100,000! From now until the final submission date of 23 September 2012, 55 participants with the most “Likes” on their entries will be chosen to go on to the grand finale on 29 September 2012.
At the challenge finale, the 55 finalists are to replicate their cupcake designs, witnessed by the public and a panel of celebrity judges who will choose the top 3 cupcake designs based on creativity, uniqueness and closest match to submitted photos.
And…oh my, the Celcom-sponsored prizes up for grabs are really attractive! The top 3 winners will get a brand new Samsung Galaxy S-III smartphone worth RM2,199 each and RM10,000, RM5,000 and RM2,000 cash for the first, second and third places respectively. The rest of the 52 finalists will each receive a stylish LG Prada mobile phone for their achievements. Well, those are really great incentives to participate, aren’t they? So, go on, bake a cupcake, decorate it with your own interpretation of national pride and participate now! Bake it, decorate it, shoot it and upload it to www.facebook.com/cupcakeschallenge … It is that simple, yes!
I heard there will also be free Celcom cupcake giveaways on 16 September 2012 – Malaysia Day, at selected malls. For more updates on the list of selected malls and the Celcom Cupcake Challenge, check out www.facebook.com/cupcakeschallenge or www.celcom.com.my or call 1-300-111-000 or 1111 from a Celcom mobile.
We missed you there Chris.. but you wrote this post so well! 😀 well done to Derek too.. awesome photos!
Hehe, can see everyone had great fun ya! Derek enjoyed it totally and that’s why Mr PureGlutton wrote this post with so much heart! 😉