Great Escape

This weekend I had the opportunity to join in the Great Escape which is a weekend getaway for adult Girl Scouts.  I haven't done anything with girl scouts since I graduated from high school but I have a friend whose mom is big in organizing the trip every year and my friend was on the kitchen staff last year.  I was invited to join the kitchen staff this year and thought it might be a fun opportunity.  So Friday afternoon we headed up to Camp Wabasso in New Hampshire.  This is the girl scout camp where I went for two summers in middle school so I was curious to see if it had changed at all.

Once we got there we dove straight into food prep for the weekend.  The other kitchen girls were super nice and welcoming and put me straight to work.  Job number one was chopping 12 onions.  I was a mess by the end.  Onions do NOT like my eyes!!  We stayed in the kitchen until almost midnight but were able to prep almost everything for the next day.  We headed off to our tent in the rain and tried to get as much sleep as we could on a cold night.

The next morning saw a 6:00 AM wake up call and we were off into full breakfast mode.  I think I mixed about 8 pitchers of pancake batter and there were trays upon trays of bacon to be cooked as well as giant pots of oatmeal to stir.  Breakfast seemed to fly by and soon we were washing dishes and prepping for lunch.  Two different soups as well as a salad bar and baked potato bar seemed to come right together and it was on to decorating cupcakes for the big 30th birthday party later that evening.  8 different kind of cupcakes and decorations had us busy as well as three different cannoli fillings!  I focused on cupcake decorating while the others put together the lasagnas for dinner.

lots of bacon

lots of bacon drippings!!

We decorated the cupcakes with many different girl scout themes - from campfires, to music notes, daisies, Samoas, Thin Mints, and of course, gold and silver.  They looked SO good and people took lots of pictures before diving in.  By this point I was realizing how exhausting cooking for 80-100 people was!  We were able to escape for half an hour to take a walk to the lake but other than that we were in the kitchen all day!  My feet were not happy!

the beginnings of a cupcake campfire

hand piped daisy decorations

lots of antipasto skewers

meatball, anyone?

gold cupcakes

silver cupcakes

Samoa and daisy cupcakes

music notes

How cool are those campfire cupcakes??

mmm... cannolis...

I wish I had a good picture of the final display because it was amazing, but it wouldn't all fit into my little iphone camera screen.  Suffice it to say, it was awesome!!

Breakfast was pretty easy to prep for so we hit the tents a little earlier that night and slept straight through the night, waking up to an owl hooting right over our heads the next morning.  Breakfast was lots and lots of french toast, sausages, and potatoes.  I think everyone's favorite part was making stuffed french toast with the leftover cannoli filling from the night before.  Delish!  Some people even put it in their oatmeal!!  After washing lots of dishes and cleaning up the kitchen we were ready to head for home.

 French toast stuffed with cannoli filling.  Heaven...

I had such a fun time on this trip even though I barely saw anything but the inside of the kitchen.  It was neat to see the things that I remembered from camp such as flag ceremonies and sing a longs as well as people doing crafts, hiking, and archery.  It rained almost the whole weekend but this group of women didn't care.  They were there to relax and have fun, even if it meant knitting in the dining hall rather than relaxing outside.  I came home totally exhausted but felt great after lots of compliments on our meals.  It was fun to be a girl scout again!

 scenes from our walk

 got my toes in the water, even if it was cold and rainy!