License to Spill at the Dogwood Festival

We’re breaking away from our usual chronological format to talk about what we did this past Saturday, so that – hopefully – we can let some friends and readers up the road know about an event traveling in their direction. The syndicated Better Show – shown locally on CBS affiliate WGCL – has teamed up with sponsor Mohawk Flooring for a tour called License to Spill, and they’ve been showing up at festivals and fairs eating messy food and, at some stops, smearing this messy food all over carpet samples to demonstrate that no matter what homeowners can do to their floor, Mohawk carpets can be cleaned. We rarely go in for product testimonials here, but I can truly say that when I lived in Oconee County some years ago, and the then-baby girlchild and her older brother routinely tossed their chocolate milk everywhere, I wished that we had carpet that cleaned like I saw this stuff.

Marie and I were invited to join the License to Spill team to show off a local treat, and judge it not for its potential destruction of living room carpets, but for its taste. They hooked up with the crew behind one of the local Smallcakes stores, and they brought in two thousand of their new peach cobbler cakes in two varieties. One had a white icing and the other had a dark icing and a dusting of cinnamon.

I was a little skeptical about mixing peach and cinnamon, but these proved me wrong. They were really tasty. The regular peach Smallcakes were very good, and the cinnamon ones extremely so. And we got to go on the record about that on TV; we taped a segment with Smallcakes’ Jeff Martin and WGCL’s Markina Brown gobbling down a few of the cupcakes and letting them know how impressed we were. This will probably go out on Better Show this week.

The crowd also enjoyed the Smallcakes samples. It took about four hours to make two thousand of them, and I figure about 1900 were eaten and another hundred smeared on carpet before 2 pm. Smallcakes has competed on TV’s Cupcake Wars at least three times, and they’ve parlayed that publicity into thirteen stores in six states, with more Georgia stores planned for Smyrna, Augusta, Tifton, and Albany soon.

We enjoyed our trip to the Dogwood Festival. We left with a birthday present for the baby, and got a good bit of sun, enough to leave our faces nice and pink. We also enjoyed observing the remarkable sales tactic of a well-dressed fellow on the train both to Five Points and – astonishingly – back to Holmes making his way from car to car with a black bag full of highlighters, ink pens, and post-it notes, which are exactly what I always leave my house intending to buy on the subway.

The Better Show team will be up the road just west of Chattanooga this coming Saturday. They’ll be pulling into South Pittsburg on April 27 for the National Cornbread Festival, which sounds like a lot of fun. Then it’s up to Chicago with License to Spill for another appearance on May 4 at the Chocolate Festival, and they’ve invited a Chicago blogger called The Ghost Guest to join them for that. So if you’re in either of those areas, be sure to stop by and say hello and see what kind of messy food they’ve found. In our experience, it goes fast!

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