It may already have come to your attention that Monday was the beginning of Fairtrade Fortnight, and we thought this was the perfect excuse to combine our commitment to ethical ingredients with our love of cake to bring you... the Loch Leven Big Fairtrade Bake Off!
So, if you've ever been perusing our cake cabinet and thought 'I wish they would make coffee cake' or 'I quite fancy a slice of chocolate beetroot cake', now is your chance to see your cake of choice baked and sold in the cafe!
Fairtrade fortnight runs from Monday 25 February to 10 March. We're giving you the first week (until Monday 4th) to submit your tasty cake recipes either as a comment below this blog, on our facebook page, or drop it in to the box in the visitor centre. Then the cafe team will choose their favourite recipes to try, and will get busy baking in the cafe (using fairtrade ingredients!) for the second week.
So what's all the fuss about Fairtrade I hear you ask? I have blogged before about our commitment to using organic ingredients in our cafe, and now it is time to turn the spotlight on Fairtrade.
Fairtrade is about ensuring better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world. When the Fairtrade Foundation first entered public conciousness, a lot of people thought it was just coffee, bananas and sugar; but the list of fairly traded products now runs to wine, cotton, chocolate, flowers, rice, cosmetics and even gold!
It is simple to switch to fairtrade, to make a positive vote for better standards while you're shopping. Not only is choosing fairtrade good for the producers, but there are environmental standards to achieve before being awarded Fairtrade certification and these small scale productions will have less of an impact on the local habitats and environment than huge scale production methods. And as we know, birds and wildlife don't acknowledge international boundaries and passport control, so if we're going to stand up for better environmental standards at home, we must stand up for them abroad too.
We hope you'll join us this Fairtrade Fortnight and pop some Fairtrade ingredients into your basket when you're shopping!
And we certainly hope you'll join the fun and enter our Big Fairtrade Bake Off, we'll be needed people to come and try these tasty cakes!!