Animal Lib QLD Bake Sale at The Green Edge

A few weeks ago I organised a bake sale for Animal Lib Queensland. I've organised many many bake sales before, through my vegan bake sale group Eating For Animals. I have been trying to become more involved with ALQ in a way that suits my strengths, and when it comes down to it my strengths are baking and doing bake sales. This was by far the biggest and most successful bake sale I have organised to date though, the ALQ supporters were amazing in their turn out. The baking was mostly done by me and by Bec, who is the Campaign Director for ALQ, and by a few other members of ALQ as well. The sale was held at The Green Edge, Brisbane's vegan grocery store. They are wonderful at making space available for groups to hold bake sales for fundraising.

Here's a look at what I made!

Berry Patch Brownies from Let Them Eat Vegan by Dreena Burton: I have just realised that I have never posted about these on this blog... which is outrageous as this is the recipe I have made most from any of my cookbooks ever! These are in serious demand at bake sales (or for any other reason you can think), and always sell out fast. A dense and chocolately brownie base with a topping of raspberry jam, blueberries and chocolate chips. They are SO GOOD! I like to cut them into big triangles for bake sales, because you want your brownie to be super special!
Rating: :D :D :D (seriously... make them...)



Beetroot and Lemon Cupcakes from The New Vegan by Aine Carlin: These are beautiful, with a gently beet flavoured cupcake and a zesty lemon icing. I made a double batch of cupcakes, but just a single batch of icing, and the ratio was perfect for me. The batter was beautifully pink, but baked up dainty and pale. This is very different from the dark red cupcakes in the photo in the book, but Aine said that her vary in colour a lot between batches depending on the beetroot.
Rating: :)



Peanut Butter Butterscotch Cookies from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur by Kelly Peloza: I have a serious stash of butterscotch chips from the US that I need to use up, and these cookies were perfect. They go nice and crunchy, and the combination of peanut butter and sweet butterscotch was great. I didn't have butterscotch extract, so I used maple instead (not the same I know, but kind of close), and I mixed in chopped peanuts and butterscotch chips as my add ins.
Rating: :)



Chocolate Ginger Gluten-Freedom Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero: This chocolate gluten freedom cupcake from this book is my standard go to gf cupcake base. For this time I followed the instructions for the Chocolate Ginger variation of the regular chocolate cupakes in the book, adding in ground ginger and chopped crystallised ginger. I topped with chocolate ganache and added a piece of ginger on top.
Rating: :)



Hidden Treasure Muffins from Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes: These are lemony muffins filled with jam (I chose strawberry) and topped with a strusel. I made a couple of subs, using brown sugar instead of sucanat and soy milk instead of refrigerated coconut milk. This has a lot of lemon in the batter - juice, zest and 20mL of lemon extract. I ran out of lemon extract at 15mL, and only had a little bit of zest, but they were still very lemony. These had a very thick batter.
Rating: :)



'Chloestess' Creme-Filled Cupcakes from Chloe's Kitchen by Chloe Coscarelli: I won't lie, I was pretty excited to finally make these, and pretty happy with the final result. They look kind of pretty, even though I need to work on my piping. This recipe makes 14 cupcakes, however the creme frosting recipe makes about twice as much as I was able to use with filling and decorating the cupcakes. It seems to be her basic frosting recipe, however, so I have frozen the leftovers to use for another batch of different cupcakes for a later time. The ganache also makes a bit too much, but I was able to use leftovers for the chocolate ginger cupcakes above. I didn't have a Bismark tip for filling the cupcakes, but I used a teeny holed tip, and they filled very easily. I am pretty happy with these all round. :)
Rating: :)



Orange Double Chocolate Cookies from 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman: I had managed to acquire two tins of vegan condensed milk, which I am not a fan of, so I wanted to use it all up for this bake sale. I used one tin to make a half batch of these, which made 15 cookies using an Australian TBS as the scoop. The dough is very soft, so I chilled it a little bit before making it into cookies and baking. My orange ended up being mouldy, so I didn't have any orange zest to add, and the orange extract didn't really come through very strong. These were a soft and sweet cookie.
Rating: :)



Gluten-Free Spicy Brownie Cake from 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman: This is a very soft brownie cake based on rice flour that has a nice, subtle spiciness to it thanks to a host of different spices, including white pepper. I had to bake this an extra 15 minutes to get it to fully set all the way through.
Rating: :)



Chocolate Cranberry Almond Oops Cookies: Remember I said I made a half batch of those double chocolate cookies? That was all fine, until I accidentally added the full amount of flour and sugar to the rest of the half batch dry ingredients and had to start again. So the accidental mix I turned into these cookies with the suggestion of a friend as to potential ratios. I added too much oil, and had to blot the batter a lot, but they actually turned out OK. I added cranberries and almonds to them.



Coconut Ice: To use up my last tin of soy condensed milk, I used this recipe. I also added some strawberry extract to the pink layer, to make it a strawberry coconut ice. I am not a big coconut ice fan, but apparently it was well recieved!



I also made a batch of Soulhaus Cookies from Great Gluten-Free Vegan Eats by Allyson Kramer, another thing I always bring to bake sales, which I have blogged about here, as well as some sausage rolls.

It was so busy, I didn't have a chance to take photos of everything else that people brought. But here is a photo of Bec's famous Cinnamon Snails, as well as the table itself.





Afterwards we stayed for lunch at The Green Edge. Bec had the Satay Burger and I had the Avocado, Tomato, Ham and Cheese Toasty, and we both had the gravy chips.





As I mentioned, it was a huge day. The bake sale was scheduled for four hours, but we had sold out of everything within two hours. I have never seen anything like it! All up, including sales and some generous donations, we made just over $1700, which is the most of any bake sale I have ever done. This money will be used to help ALQ's anti-greyhound racing and ditch dairy campaigns, as well as their other work.

I'll be doing another bake sale at the end of April with Eating For Animals for the World Wide Vegan Bake Sale.

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



I was washing my sheets and had my doona folded up on the floor at the foot of the bed, and of course Sahara decided that this was the perfect spot for some serious slumber.