aqua shard Aces – the kings & queens of pancake races!

Posted on March 5, 2014 by admin

Tuesday 4th March was, of course, Pancake Day, and we were very excited when local theatre company London Bubble announced that they were organising a charity pancake race!

We didn’t need much persuading to put a team together to have fun while fundraising for LB+, London Bubble’s training programme offering life opportunities to unemployed young people who are also neither in education or training (NEET).

Thus it was that on a beautiful sunny (if rather chilly) day, restaurant managers Alex and Nicolas, Hattie and Samantha from head office and Istvan from the logistics team, with supporters in tow, donned their trainers and jogged across the road to The Scoop at More London to compete against teams from other local businesses including PwC, Norton Rose, Kalmars, The Futures Company and Architype.

LB+ very kindly allocated one of their young people to each team and ours, Andrew, was a real asset! The race began with a treasure hunt to find the ingredients needed to make pancake batter; each team was allocated a colour and had to find the corresponding items (resulting in some delay for us when someone took the yellow milk by mistake…) and then exchanged their batter for a ready-made pancake in a pan for flipping!

The main race then began, a relay around The Scoop involving obstacles and – of course – pancake-flipping. Hattie’s hidden talents as a master-flipper will be the talk of the office for days to come, and Istvan showed that he might be as handy in the kitchen as he is in the loading bay! There was fierce competition – and not a little barging – to win the race and aqua shard Aces finished a very respectable fourth overall, just missing out on a podium position.

We were winners in one respect though – prizes were awarded for best supporters, and our vocal, placard-toting, banner-waving crew were rewarded with chocolates for their efforts! All-in-all it was a wonderful way to raise money for a great local cause, and we’re sure to be back next year – with our eyes on gold!

From 4th-7th March inclusive we are supporting LB+ by donating £1 from the sale of every portion of sweet or savoury pancakes sold. For details of these dishes see our previous blog post.