Bake Sales (and a Bonus Burger)

Hello friends! What is this? It is a blog post! Yay! I am hoping that blogging more regularly is going to give me some nice structure and a way to pass the time, which seems pretty endless at the moment.

Cast your mind back to a time but a few months ago, when we could do things like bake for and attend bake sales. Seems like a distant memory, but I assure you it was true. At least, I think it was. Otherwise how would I have these photos? Earlier this year, I baked for two bake sales (one for Farm Animal Rescue at Grassfed, and one for Cranky's Farm at The Green Edge). Here are the things I made!

Cashew Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur: These lovely cookies use cashew butter (though I didn't have quite enough, so I topped it up with a bit of almond butter), oats, chocolate chips, and chopped roasted cashews. As I was making these for a bake sale, I used an ice cream scoop to get 14 cookies, and I baked them for about 15 minutes (rather than 6 monites for 20 smaller cookies).
Rating: :)



Chocolate Cherry Brownies from 350 Best Vegan Recipes: These use a mix of melted chocolate chips and vegan butter for a fudgy brownie. I found that they were quite greasy on the base and sides after baking, so perhaps it needed a little less butter and a little more chocolate. It uses dried cherries soaked in brandy, but I just soaked in warm water as I don't have brandy. I needed to bake this for about 35 minutes to get it cooked, rather than the 20-25 the recipe stated. I cut it into 8 satisfying bake sale brownie slices. The recipe says it makes 25 small brownies, which in an 8 x 8 inch pan means some very teeny brownies! Oh, these also have walnuts in them.
Rating: :)



Orange Ginger Cookies from 500 Vegan Recipes: These were meant to be Orange Cappuccino Cookies, but I hate coffee (even the smell), so I changed it up bu adding 1 1/2 tsp of ground ginger instead of espresso powder. The orange and ginger flavours ended up being pretty suble in this, so they were more like regular chocolate chip cookies with a hint of something else.
Rating: :)



Cherry Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies from 500 Vegan Recipes: These cookies are a delight, and used up some of the coconut flour stash I had randomly accumulated. They are a mix of coconut flour, plain flour, and oats, also filled with dried cherries, chocolate chips, and coconut (it said to use sweetened coconut flakes, I only had unsweetened shreds, but it was sweet enough already). These make for some delicious, sweet, soft, cookies.
Rating: :D



Butterscotch Chocolate Fudge Brownies: I also have a random stash of butterscotch chips, which this recipe helped me work through. It's a mix of melted regular chocolate chips and butterscotch chips, plus more mixed through the batter, plus I added some extra butterscotch chips on top so you could see them. These are very dense and fudgy, and use sweet potato puree as part of the wet ingredients!
Rating: :)



And please enjoy this bonus photo of a delicious breakfast burger that I got when I was dropping stuff off for the FAR bake sale at Grassfed.



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



What would I do without this beloved black baby by my side?