Holiday cheer by way of 1,500 cupcakes

So there's this phenomenon every year at my place of employment. I call it the Holiday Cheer Epidemic, because that's exactly what our top boss asked for a few years ago to counter a rash of bad news in the paper. Holiday Cheer stories. The kind that people find uplifting.

It makes sense to some degree. The holidays move people to volunteer time, donate presents and otherwise do nice things for people who aren't as fortunate. That's a lot of what is going on in the community.

I'll be honest that some of these efforts have rubbed me the wrong way over the years, coming off as condescending or self-serving. Besides, people who need help need it all year long. Not just at Christmas.

And the irony of Holiday Cheer stories is that once you cut through the warmth they really aren't that cheery. They're really about people who are hungry, homeless or otherwise struggling to get by, and that can be tough to get across in a simple news story.

But over the years I've become less jaded and figured out a way to write Holiday Cheer stories to my liking. The solution has been to look for genuine people trying in the very simplest (AKA: not attention grabbing and splashy) ways to make the holidays a little more bearable for some people. Besides, why not cash in on this spirit of giving and generosity and inspire people to help out the children.

This week I found Chef Cindy.

I heard about Chef Cindy doing another Holiday Cheer story at one of the high schools. I wrote a story last week about how the year-round food pantry the school had started to help needy kids and their families was empty. They got cleaned out right before Thanksgiving. After the story ran, the school got an outpouring of support - food, clothes and over $4,000 to help families with things like utilities. One of the largest donations was a batch of food to feed 400 people from the area food bank.

As we were waiting for the food to arrive on Wednesday the lady from the food bank started casually telling me about a woman who made 1,500 cupcakes to send home with homeless and needy children for Christmas. I'm not sure she realized that's a heck of a lot of baking.

"Did you say 1,500?" I asked her, just as a point of clarification. Journalists like to be accurate.

She looked at me like I had just landed from Mars for questioning whether a single woman was really baking 1,500 cupcakes to distribute to poor children.

"Uh, huh," she replied. "1,500. They're going out Friday."

I had my notebook out and started doing some basic long division. That would be about 125 dozen cupcakes ... You could maybe fit four dozen in a standard oven at a time ... Baking time is about 25 to 30 minutes ...

I couldn't believe someone was actually doing this.

So I set out on my quest to write about the Cupcake Lady.

I went back to the office and pitched the story to my editors. They signed off, so I called the food bank and asked them if they could put me in contact with Chef Cindy. And then I did the thing most journalists hate. I waited.

A few hours went by before the lady from the food bank called me back and gave me Chef Cindy's number.

"She's a little," she paused. "Shy. But I think she'll talk to you since this is such a good story."

I called and left a message, waited about an hour and got no answer. Of course we had to try and get photos of her baking, and that meant we had to do it Thursday.

I think I let two hours pass before I walked down to the restaurant where she was alleged to be baking. It was closed, the dining room dark, but I could see a light on back in the kitchen.

"Do I go around the back and knock on the door?" I thought. "Would that be creepy?"

It's important to note this kind of determined reporting is usually reserved for big stories or tracking down bad guys. I still can't believe I put forth this much effort toward a story about cupcakes. Stories about baked goods just shouldn't be so challenging.

I opted not to stalk her through the back of the kitchen.

"I'm sure she'll call me back later." I thought.

I left the office and headed home. Around eight-o-clock it was bugging me I never heard from her. The chances of us getting any kind of photo in her kitchen were getting slimmer and slimmer.

I dialed the number I had saved in my phone as Cupcake Lady and to my surprise she answered.

"Hello," said an obviously frazzled voice on the other end. "This is Cindy."

"Hi," I started. "This is Tiffany, the reporter from the Herald-Tribune. I think the food bank told you I might be calling.

She gushed a sigh.

"Oh," she said, clearly regretting she picked up the phone.

She continued with a note of exasperation:

"I'm a little busy. I'm on my way to Sam's Club. I RAN OUT OF EGGS. I only have 500 cupcakes done. I have A THOUSAND I need to finish by Friday. I'm going to be up all night. I DON'T KNOW HOW I will ever finish."

For a moment I wished I could volunteer to help, but reporters don't really do that sort of thing. So instead I just asked if we could come hang out and get some photos of her baking.

"I'm not really very photogenic," she said. "I'm a mess. I'm covered in cake batter. And I can't really have you in my kitchen. I HAVE TO FINISH A THOUSAND CUPCAKES."

My attempts to sway her were useless. I agreed that we would just come get a picture of her when she dropped off the cupcakes Friday morning at the food bank.

It took most of the day Thursday to even get a time flushed out for when the big drop would happen. Then finally we got word: 8 a.m. Friday morning.

I barely get my butt to work before 10 a.m. most days, but for the Cupcake Lady, I'd get there early.

Shortly after the photographer and I arrived, the woman from the food bank came down to greet us with a shocked expression.

"She's gone," she said. "She must have come really early and just left the cupcakes. They were here when the first person got here."

"Sneaky," I thought, annoyed, but kind of admiring the Cupcake Lady for eluding us.

Anyway, as it always does, it all worked out in the end. I called Chef Cindy and, after laughing a little - probably for pulling one over on me - she did chat with me for a bit about why she took on this effort.

"It just bothered me so much," she said. "That some children go hungry. I can't solve their problems, but maybe I can make them happy."

These are the kind of stories I love, anytime of year. Normal, everyday people doing creative and extraordinary things to make a difference. Even a little one, especially for children.

But those are the stories that are also hardest to write. How do you take an incredible person, all their emotions and drive, and put them into words on paper?

We went to a school later and watched the principal and guidance counselor hand out the cupcakes and bags of food for the winter holidays to about 50 homeless and needy children.

Watching this sort of thing used to really upset me when I started covering schools seven years ago. It's hard to comprehend so many kids not having anything to eat for two weeks but a bag of beefaroni and canned veggies when some of us are so lucky. The TV reporter said she was ready to start crying. So did the lady from the food bank when we were at Booker High on Wednesday.

Even after so many stories and so many years covering schools, I still get choked up a little sometimes. But I guess you kind of get used to it after awhile. All you can do is use your talents to try to help them.

At some point the lead for my story just popped in my head, inspired by the ultimate of holiday cheesiness and drawing the parallel between Chef Cindy and Santa.

"She came in early Friday, leaving no trace of her visit but 1,500 cupcakes."

The whole time I worked on this I kept trying to wrap my mind around 1,500 cupcakes. Just how much is that? Well if you're curious, check out the sweet graphic on the story.

And Chef Cindy may have tried to dupe me, but clearly didn't get up early enough in the morning. Everyone reading the story would want to know what the Cupcake Lady looked like. As it turned out, we had a nice picture of her in our archives from a cooking demo she did a few years ago, so we were able to run that with the story (I don't think, by the way, Cindy was opposed to running her picture in the paper, I think she just didn't want to make a big deal about her part in the cupcake situation).

So as I said to our graphic artist in sheer fun when it was all done:

"Put that in your Kitchenaid and mix it."

Happy holidays!