Picture of the Mozart Dessert served as part of a Mozart Dinner Celebration in Austria

VillageSoup.com is reporting that the Camden Hills Regional High School Chamber Singers and Women’s Choir are hosting a fabulous Dessert Cabaret. A Dessert Cabaret is where area restaurants donate two identical desserts. One dessert is sliced into tasting samples and the other dessert is a presentation. Audience members get to taste samples from a variety of delectable desserts while listening to entertaining musical selections provided by the choirs. Audience members vote for their favorite tasting dessert and their favorite presentation. At the end of the evening, the presentation desserts are auctioned off. Lucky auction winners get to “take the cake”! Not only are funds raised during the auction, but there is a $10 ticket to attend the event. And who doesn’t like dessert? Click here for the full article.

P.S. 20051007. Kim Murphy responded directly to a query from MCI and gave the following additional insight into the event (thank you Kim!):

The fundraiser was last night….and very successful. Although all receipts are not in…it looks like we probably netted almost $3000!
Although labor intensive - it was almost all pure profit - so a great fundraiser from that aspect.

Here are some details that might help others to plan a similar event:
1) 2 parents solicited dessert donations from area restaurants and interested individuals. Interested restaurants/persons had to donate two identical desserts. One dessert was cut up into taste samples (small portions in cupcake baking papers), and the other dessert was the “presentation”
2) 1 parent to create poster and PR to newspapers
3) reserved school cafeteria
4) 1 parent to take care of coffee/tea/water - coffee pots borrowed from school Family Consumer Sciences dept
5) 1 parent to gather papergoods/forks and gift certificates for winning desserts
6) 1 parent to get auctioneer
7) labor intensive part of the evening is the set up. Students helped with the physical set up. And some of the prior event labor such as :
tickets, creation of vote slips, covering coffee cans for vote containers, setting up risers - piano - sound etc, tablecloths, candles on tables about 10 parents (wielding knives) arrived from 4:30 - 6 (event started at
7) to cut desserts into taste samples. This was the labor part - intensive - but actually lots of fun.
8) 1 parent to take care of tickets, and another to keep track of the auctioned desserts
9) everybody helped with clean up

The evening started with the singers circling the hall singing “Welcome, Welcome Every Guest” An explanation of the evening followed. Each ticket holder had 2 votes (a pink “best tasting” and a blue “best presentation”) Attendees taste sampled as many desserts, as many times as they wanted and then placed their vote in the container next to the dessert for which they were voting. The students provided music for about an hour. The votes were counted (by 1 parent), the desserts were auctioned off (with an announcement of Best Presentation and Best Tasting - they will receive award certificates); we had a GREAT auctioneer - fun, fast, and got those dollars rolling! The evening started promptly at 7PM and ended at 8:45PM.
The clean up was done in a half hour. Note: some audience members didn’t stay for the auction…but as it was a casual, walking around affair - that was fine too.

This is a great night and fundraiser. Our only cost was the posters as everything else was done in -house, or donated. The desssert cutting is the hardest part. The first time we did this, we didn’t have enough knives or cutters or time. So this time we were on top of that - and the parents had a fun time with the knife wielding part! Also, we stole this idea. There used to be a medical center that did an elegant “Just Desserts” fundraiser every year, and our students were invited as the paid entertainers. Once that medical center changed into a retirement village and stopped having this fundraiser - I stole the idea! I encourage others to try this night.