Gabe The Cake Man & Livvy Raised $35,000 to build a Hospital in the Congo Through Samaritan's Purse!!

Psalm 34: 3 says, "O Magnify the Lord with me; Let us PRAISE His name together!"

This is our silent auction cake.  A $500 donation was made to the Ali Center for it.

In our last post, we were dying to tell everyone the amazing thing that God did for us at the 2014 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards but we wanted to wait until you could all see it on our donations page!  A little while after Livvy and I gave our speech at the awards ceremony, Mr. Lessare, the CEO of the Ali Center came up to our dad and told us that there was a person in the audience that heard our speech who was so moved by our project and our words, they wanted to make a donation to our project.  They told Mr. Lessare that whatever we did not raise from the auction of our cake, they would donate to get us to $35,000!! (We had already raised $22,173 up to that point).  We were so excited we could hardly stand it! We didn't know whether to laugh, cry, scream, run around dancing...so we did what we have done every other time something great happens (or bad happens for that matter).  We PRAYED!  My mom, dad, Livvy and I prayed and thanked the LORD for doing this great thing for us!  To some people, they might call this a coincidence.  Someone once said, "All I know is that when I pray, coincidences happen a lot more often"!  We KNOW this was no coincidence!  GOD let that person be in the audience, hear about our project and have a kind and caring heart to help us finish it!   We really wanted to meet this person but he wanted to remain anonymous so we have been praying for him to be richly blessed because of his generosity.  Yesterday he made the donation and it was SO MUCH FUN to be able to go to youth group last night and tell everyone all about it!  They had prayed for me and Livvy last week and they all wanted to hear how it went.  When we told them that we are now OVER 100% they clapped!

Livvy and I made 50 cupcakes in about an hour to bring to the youth group to celebrate with!

We are now over $35,000...and we are going to keep going because we still have our craft bazaar coming up on October 18 from 9-2 at the Woodland Baptist Church.  We are now going to have a PARTY!  We will be giving away (can you guess?)  FREE CUPCAKES!  So come join us and celebrate this wonderful thing that God has done for us!  We can't wait to see what will happen with this hospital, clinic or upgrades that can now go forward in the Democratic Republic of Congo!

This reminded us of doing camp cupcakes!  The students loved them!

Livvy & Gabe The Cake Man meet Muhammad Ali at the Ali Humanitarian Awards

Muhammad says, "I will float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!"

Wow!  Where do we start with this?  Back in June the Muhammad Ali Center had called us and asked us to be part of the Congo14 celebration.  If you remember, we spoke at their press conference when they announced that Bruno Mars was going to be the singer they were hosting.  The Ali Center asked us if we would come be a part of their annual Humanitarian Awards to be held on 10/27/14.  We said yes because we have never seen something like that and it sounded like fun to go to a banquet.  They also asked us to make a cake for their silent auction.  This would be raffled off and 1/2 of what they got for the cake would go to our project and the other half would go to the Ali Center.  We said yes for that too.  Well, this week was the week of the concert and then yesterday, was the second annual Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards.  Livvy and I found out that Kid President (Robbie Novak) was going to be there, so we asked if we could make him a special cake.  We also wanted to make a cake for Muhammad Ali so that when we met him, we would be able to give him a special treat.

We can't even describe how amazing it was to meet Muhammad Ali in person!

This is the cake we made to give to Muhammad Ali on September 27, 2014

They had a special table just for our cakes!

Kid President was so much fun!  He liked the cake!

As the week got closer and closer we got more nervous.  It started to seem like it was going to be hard.  My mom decided to see if we could go to Sullivan Bakery to decorate the cakes so that if we needed some help, Chef Richardson was there to help us. We were so glad we did this!  She was so helpful with smoothing the big cake and for helping us get the piping right and not turning it brown with the colors mixing too much!  Here are pictures of the cakes and the event.  It was like nothing we have ever ever ever done before!  If you click HERE you can watch our speech.  (if you watch all the way to the end you can see a really amazing video of the project the Humanitarian of the Year did).  Matt Lauer from the Today show was the MC for the evening.  It was fun to meet him.  He is the person that interviewed Dr. Brantley who lived to tell about having ebola!  Dr. Brantley is a missionary for Samaritan's Purse so that was fun to have as a common connection.

Livvy is putting on the first layer of frosting for our auction cake

Chef Richardson was giving advice about the number 1 cake for Muhammad WAVE3 was filming it

I had the edible image on the cake and was starting the piping around it

Finishing the piping.  I love the rainbow!  Chef Richardson approves!

Such a great feeling to be done!  I came up with the image and Big Idea Media Group helped make it on the computer!

We had a auction table for the silent auction and set up our display

When we got up to speak they had a picture of us up on the big screens

Here we are practicing in the afternoon before the banquet

Both Livvy and I spoke to about 750 people!

Muhammad Ali Center Congo14, Bruno Mars, Gabe The Cake Man & Livvy-Bug Will Make a Great TEAM

Two weeks ago we had an amazing turn of events in our project!  It hasn't really gotten us many new donations, but we got to do some super cool things!  First, we were called by the Food Network Channel to see if we wanted to try out for a kid cooking challenge contest show.  (We said, "No".)  This was an honor for us to realize that they saw our WAVE3 news spot from when we made Abbey's wedding cake, but the opportunity didn't really seem to fit with our project and we don't really want to do things for fame.  We are trying really hard to just keep doing what we are doing so that God gets all the glory.

But on that SAME DAY, we were called by the Muhammad Ali Center because they wanted to ask us if we wanted to be a part of their upcoming press release they were having to tell the press about who their A-List singer is going to be in September for their Congo14 event. (It is Bruno Mars) It was pretty cool how this is working out that the Muhammad Ali Center is going to be doing this event in Louisville and the Congo at the same time to celebrate the anniversary of when Muhammad Ali fought George Forman in Zaire (which is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) 40 years ago, and we are trying to get enough money to build a hospital there!  The Ali Center wanted to know if we would speak at the Press Conference and tell about what we are doing to help the people in the Congo!  We said, "Yes", not because we wanted to speak, that was actually super scary, but because it seems like we have some shared goals. WDRB News included us just a tiny bit in their story about the press conference on the news that night.  You can see that here:  WDRB News Clip

In the end, it was scary but also kind-of fun!  We got to tour the Ali Center for free and we got to go back to Sullivan University to learn two more super cool things!  Chef Richardson taught us how to print out an edible image (which our wonderful friend, actually my mom's best friend, Denise who owns Big Idea Media Group, made for us with the Congo14 logo and an image of the Rumble in the Jungle on it) and put it on a cake.  We also learned how to do rainbow piping around the cake!  Here is a video of us learning this stuff at Sullivan: Click Here.

Here are a few pictures of the cake:

We gave our speeches but they were not on the news or anything.  Many of the people at the press conference came up and talked to us after it was over and took our card with the link to our blog, but nothing has really come from that.  My dad thinks this is because God wants to prove that it is only HIM doing this project with us!  God is using children like us to bring in the donations so God wants to show He can do this big thing through the least likely source.  Livvy & I think this is true.  So far, it is really children doing their 1% or people donating their 1% that have gotten us to 37%!  Anyway, if you would like to see our speeches, click this and go to the 8:34 minute mark.  We are super excited that the Ali Center people have told us we can come to the Congo14 celebration and even meet the ambassador of the Congo and Bruno Mars.  We are hoping this means we will meet Muhammad Ali too.  :)  

Thanks for reading about it and most of all, keep praying for us!  (And by the way, everyone really seemed to like the cake.  We had made it a surprise by making the cake batter into a tie-dye pattern with red, blue, purple and black!)