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Our local church set up to have a speaker come in and talk with the women and girls of our congregation. A group of women in our church is referred to as the relief society. The women that were organizing the event wanted to serve a little treat after the meeting. Lissa was one of the individuals helping to organize everything. They decided to serve cake, and that their husbands could help. That way the organizers could listen to the message without distraction. This was my first opportunity to be involved in serving relief society cake.

I’ve helped to feed the scouts and other groups of youth in the past. It can be a real challenge figuring out how much food to buy, and what the kids will eat. I can put together a menu and feed a bunch of boys for a week with less effort than these women went through to offer cake at the end of a meeting. I’m not saying that to complain, it’s just interesting the different dynamics going on here.

Not my normal approach to things.

I’m impressed with how much thought went into trying to make sure everyone would be considered. We had gluten free cake for those with gluten issues. There were also nuts for people trying to stay away from sugar. The overall presentation was supposed to make it feel special. Things needed to look just right. That is not my specialty.

My part was first to help set up the tables that would hold the cake, water and nuts. Then we, there were 4 of us, were to help place the cake onto plates and put them on the tables. I think if someone had just asked me to do that task with no additional instruction, I would have shown up 20 minutes before the meeting was to end, and started throwing some cake on plates. That approach would never do. We were there before the meeting even started. We calculated how many plates would fit on a table. The cake was placed carefully on each plate, not thrown. I was able to place a fork on each plate to save congestion from everyone having to get their own.

Miraculously things worked out

I think we did a pretty good job of getting everything setup. We had enough cake served and ready to grab for about 80% of those in attendance. That proved to be just about right. We probably could have stopped closer to 70% and still been alright, but better safe than sorry. I felt like our presentation was fair. What do you think, should they have been turned at a 45 degree angle?

For my first go at meeting relief society cake presentation standards I think we did alright. We may not be invited to help on something like this again. I didn’t see anyone visibly upset after coming to get a piece of cake. I’m going to call that a win.