What the heck is Muffin Madness? A cooking show? A cooking contest? A fight using Muffins as projectiles? A sickness?
Nope.
Muffin Madness is a fundraiser for scholarships for graduating students at Gulf Islands Senior Secondary. One for each of trades, scholastics, and arts. GISS is a regional high school in the Southern Gulf Islands, which lie north of the San Juan Islands. Students travel inter-island by water “buses” with names like Scholarship and The Graduate to Ganges on Salt Spring Island. The school week is 4 days.
How does it work? We get a gaming licence from the Province of BC to do a raffle.
We sell 300 tickets priced at $20 each to raise $6000. The main prize is a $1000; secondary prizes are 5 $100 prizes. There are a few expenses and the net fund’s scholarships.
Where do Muffins come in? The event is held on the Sunday afternoon of the Fall Fair on beautiful Salt Spring Island and features contests for arts and crafts, food, and agricultural related judged competitions for poultry, cattle, and zucchini, car races for kids, rooster calling, and many other activities.
Cattle? That is where Muffins come from.
We square off a paddock with randomly numbered squares – 300 in total, one square per ticket sold, each square is about 1 square yard. The numbers are not shown on the squares, but we have a master X Y grid map of the randomly numbered squares. We note the square number by its X Y position on the grid. We release a cow into the paddock, and sure enough, a Muffin gets dropped fairly quickly from the cow’s back end.
We look up the ticket stub for that number to find out who the winner is. We announce it on the PA system and call their phone. This year the winner was a Fall Fair volunteer and was watching the event with his family. Yay! We ask kids to toss 5 beanbag cows onto squares to identify the 5 $100 winners.
Lots of fun, a good cause …. and now you know what Muffin Madness is.
