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?

ALQ July Bake Sale at The Green Edge

At the end of July I organised another bake sale for Animal Liberation Queensland at The Green Edge. It was a huge sale - we sold out within about two hours, and we raised over $1000! It was so great! But let's stop and see what the food was like? I made my regular Berry Patch Brownies, but I also made several new to me things, as is my habit. Living on the edge!

Orange Pudding Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. As you'll see below, we were having some fancy cupcakes donated, so I decided to try and make a filled cupcake (I can't compete with the fancy icing styles). This is an orange scented cupcake, filled with orange pudding and topped with orange marmalade and then chocolate ganache. They were so good! The pudding went very, very thick, and ended up making about twice as much as I could fit in the cupcakes. But it was yummy, so you get left over pudding to eat. These were so great! The only thing I would change is adding a bit of orange extract to the ganache next time, as it is quite thick and I think I would like it better to tie into the orange theme. I didn't get an inside shot, but these had a goodly amount of pudding in the middle!
Rating: :D



Venus Chocolate-Pumpkin Muffins from Bake and Destroy by Natalie Slater. These are named after Venus, the internet famous kitty with a half orange and half black face. In her honour, these muffins are half pumpkin and half chocolate. On eating, the pumpkin side is a bit gooey and the chocolate side is quite dense, in fact the chocolate batter was a lot thicker by comparison (and made a little bit left). This says it makes 10-11 muffins, I got 11 and 2/3 using decent sized muffin liners. The chocolate side is topped with chocolate chips, and the pumpkin side with a generous amount of strusel.
Rating: :)



Spiced Sweet Potato Blondies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. These blondies are sweet with a subtle spice to them, using a mix of cinnamon,ginger and allspice in the sweet potato based batter. They have chopped walnuts in them, though I left out the optional chocolate chips. They are very dense and moist, kind of like a slice of sweet potato pie filling!
Rating: :)



Cranberry Walnut Oat Bars from Eat Like You Give A Damn by Michelle Schwegmann and Josh Hooten. These were a last minute addition, given then they take only a few minutes to make. Dates, nuts, oats and cranberries and blended up in the food processor, and then pushed into shape to set. I pushed mine into a lined 8x8 inch pan to set, rather than shaping them into an 8x8 square on a baking sheet. They firm up quickly, but they are very thin and a bit delicate. Next time if making for a sale I'd push into a 4x8 inch tin to give a thicker and sturdier bar. I'd also consider a brief soak of the dates if they are a bit dry, I had to add a bit of extra water to keep it all together.
Rating: :)



Seven-Layer Bars from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur by Kelly Peloza. These seem like they are fiddly, but actually come together super quickly. The base is a crushed graham cracker base, but being in Australia I subbed crushed digestive biscuits. You make an easy coconut caramel, spread it over the base with some chocolate chips and then top with shredded coconut, butterscotch chips and walnuts. The chocolate chips and scattered over the top of the base and topped with the warm caramel, so they kind of just melted into one chocolate caramel layer. You need to press the toppings in sturdily, otherwise the butterscotch chip and walnuts will fall off a bit from the finished product. I needed to bake this an extra 10 minutes in my oven for it to fully set. These were a special treat, and a lot of fun.
Rating: :)



Gluten Free Chocolate Mint Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. The regular version of these cupcakes uses the basic chocolate cupcake recipe with added mint extract, so it is easy to make then gluten free using the Chocolate Gluten Freedom Cupcake recipe as the base, with added mint extract. The last time I made the mint icing, it was very soft. This time I used only 2 cups of sugar rather than three, resulting in a higher shortening to sugar ration, and it was much better and set up very nicely in the fridge. I sprinkled these with some chocolate sprinkles rather than making a ganache.
Rating: :)



Gluten Free Butterscotch Chip and Almond Cookies based on recipe from Great Gluten Free Vegan Eats by Allyson Kramer. These are the soulhaus cookies from the book, but modified to use butterscotch chips and toasted almond slivers instead of the chocolate chips. These cookies are the best GF cookies I have ever found, and one GF person at the bake sale was overwhelmed to find such a perfectly textured cookie! She was super happy that I was able to point her in the direction of the recipe. If you have GF friends, always make them these.
Rating: :D



Gluten Free Fudge Brownies from 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman. Another tasty treat thanks to some sneaky sweet potato puree! Also thanks to a cup of melted chocolate mixed into the batter. These don't rise high, but they are very dense and fudgy. The recipe says to melt the chocolate first and cool it, then add the milk and oil and potato puree. But if you do that the chocolate will start to set again. Melt the chocolate with the milk, and add the other ingredients while still warm, then let it cool a bit. I needed to cook these for an extra 20 minutes in my oven.
Rating: :)



Orange Cream Crisp Rice Treats from this recipe from the Dandies' website. I had a bag of Dandies that needed using up, so rice crispy treats seemed like a good enough thing to do. This recipe calls for a mix of vegan butter and coconut oil. I had some coconut oil kicking around in the cupboard from my pre-death days, so I decided to use some of it up here. As a result, I couldn't really enjoy the finished product because it just tasted like coconut oil to me. I thought the orange taste could have been much stronger as well. Oh well, they were not for me, they were for others, so I hope they enjoyed them.
Rating: ?



We also had a lot of great baking donations! Wonderful Brisbane vegan Katie, who runs Cloverly Cupcakes kindly offered some of her stunning creations. When Katie started Cloverly, she was the first real vegan baked goods distributor in Brisbane! She doesn't bake for shops or stalls anymore, but is still happy to whip our some gorgeous sweets for bake sales. She made a bunch of chocolate cupcakes with three different toppings. There was chocolate icing, caramel icing, and a stunning coloured vanilla icing using Russian tips. SO FANCY AND PRETTY!





Bec, who is also with ALQ, baked some of her famous cinnamon rolls. Bec recently spent 6 months studying at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, so she has mad skills!



Lisa and Paul Foo are powerhouses of the Brisbane animal rights scene, and also make amazing food. Paul is trained as a chef, and comes up with wonderful creations. This time they provided our savouries - mini cottage pies, carrot lox and bechamel filo packets, and mushroom pasties. They were all so good. I especially love the filos!



And finally we had some donations from the lovely Daniela, who runs vegan catering business The Borg Chicken and also has recently started providing vegan options for Perks Cafe in Nundah. She made some gorgeous unicorn cupcakes, as well as some mini apple and cherry pies, and a large family-sized apple pie. I enjoyed some of her cherry pies when I watched Twin Peaks the next day!







Table shot!



Afterwards we all sat down and enjoyed some Green Edge food (more of that in another post). I need to take a little break from organising bake sales, because at the moment it is a bit much, but I am glad this one was able to be so successful!

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Tomorrow (the 17th) will be six months since Sahara. I don't even know how so much time has passed. I miss her so much.

Eating For Animal's Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale for Save A Cow at The Green Edge

Wow, what a mouthful of a post title! Yesterday I held my fourth Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale. I organised it through the vegan food group I founded, Eating For Animals, and this year we were raising money for the wonderful Save A Cow. We ended up having a super lovely day. While it didn't reach the crazed crowds of the ALQ bake sale I organised in February, we had a steady stream of customers and we closed up an hour early because pretty much everything was gone. Once again, we held it at The Green Edge, who kindly made the space available to us as well as making a generous donation to the cause.

As per usual, because I love to live on the edge, I made a bunch of things that I had never made before for the bake sale, as well as my trusty Berry Patch Brownies and gluten-free Soulhaus Cookies.

Coconut Cornmeal Cupcakes with Lemon Icing from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero and The New Vegan by Aine Carlin: These were one of my gluten-free offerings. I used the gluten freedom vanilla cupcake recipe from VCTOTW as my base, using coconut milk instead of soy milk and adding coconut extract. I used cornmeal, but it was a bit grittier than the one they probably use. These cupcakes generally are pretty dense even without the cornmeal. The flavour was definitely good. I think I prefer the chocolate GF cupcake recipe in this book to the vanilla. I iced them with the lemon icing recipe from The New Vegan.
Rating: :)



Orange Vanilla Dream Bars from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur by Kelly Peloza: The base for these bars is quite thick, and ended up a little on the crunchy side because I needed to bake it a bit extra to get it to go golden, but it was a lovely orange dessert when paired with the icing (which set up perfectly). The orange flavour comes from a mix of orange juice and orange marmalade. I blitzed my marmalade in a food processor first because it had a lot of big chunks of peel in it. Very nice!
Rating: :)



Mint Cookies 'n' Cream Cupcakes from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: I find that Chloe's cupcakes tend to bake up quite big. This recipe made 16, but you could get an extra one or two out of it if you filled them a little less and they would still acceptable cupcake size. This recipe calls for crushed chocolate sandwich cookies (I used Oreos) in both the batter and the icing. I used my food processor, so they ended up more ground than crushed, and my icing turned out a fair bit darker compared to the photo in the book. All the mint in this recipe comes from the peppermint extract in the frosting, which adds a nice and refreshing note. A note for decorating - I iced the cupcakes the day before the bake sale and had them in the fridge overnight, then garnished them the morning of so that the cookies wouldn't go soggy. The icing gets super firm, so ideally leave them out of the fridge for a bit to warm up or it will crack a bit!
Rating: :)



Chocolate Cinnamon Cupcakes with Maple Frosting from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: If you are looking for these cupcakes in the book, you won't find them. The actual recipe is Cinnamon Mocha Cupcakes... but I really don't like coffee. So I changed it. In the batter, I left out the the espresso powder and doubled the cinnamon. For the icing, I used some leftover plain icing out of the freezer (probably about 1/3 to 1/2 of a regular batch of her icing) than I beat up with some more icing sugar to firm it a bit more and also some maple extract instead of the espresso powder in water. The result was amazing! Definitely my favourite of all the things I made for this sale. Who needs coffee? Try it this way!
Rating: :D



Butterscotch Apple Cookies from Quick-Fix Vegan by Robin Robertson: I made these to use up some more of my butterscotch chip haul. The dough is a bit funny. You beat butter and other liquid ingredients together, then beat in the flour, then stir in the chips and the apple. It ended up having a very gummy feel to it. These cookies also didn't spread at all, so I smooshed them down on the bake tray. They were meant to be golden brown in 10-12 minutes, but I had to bake for more like 20. I got two dozen cookies using an Australian TBS as a scoop. Despite being a bit funny to make, I ended up loving these. Mostly because of the apple and cinnamon flavours, the butterscotch wasn't too sweet. I didn't sift icing sugar over them as the recipe instructed, because that would have just been messy to take to a bake sale.
Rating: :D



Vegan Anzac Biscuits from Suzy Spoon's Vegetarian Butcher by Suzy Spoon: My mum actually made these as a contribution. She made them while I was away, and froze them until the sale. Given that the bake sale was the day before ANZAC day (which is today, the 25th), it seemed fitting to have some there. The biscuits had the classic flavour, but were quite soft. I like crispy Anzac biscuits. I wasn't sure if that was because of them being frozen, but mum said that they never went crispy even when fresh (the recipe says they will crisp up as they cook).
Rating: :)



Chickpea Blondies from 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman: Everyone's heard of black bean brownies, but how about chickpea blondies? I must admit I was intrigued to add these to my gluten-free offerings. Chickpeas, sugar, peanut butter, strawberry jam and a few other ingredients made a very dense, fudgy blondie (the only flour in it is a smidge of brown rice flour) that was delightfully not too sweet.
Rating: :)



Double Chocolate Macadamia Cookies: This made a lot of cookies (I got 50 using an Australian sized TBS as my scoop), which was good because I was able to take some to a baby shower last week and some to the bake sale yesterday. I have no patience for actually chopping macadamias, so I just crushed them with my nut mallet. These are sweet and chocolatey.
Rating: :)



So they are the new things I made. Let's see what else is on the table! My co-bakers with EFA are Marion and Lisa, and they also baked some lovely yummies.

Gluten-Free Coconut Ice by Marion.



Gluten-Free Soulhaus Cookies by me (from Great Gluten Free Vegan Eats by Allyson Kramer). I make these every bake sale.



A tray of cookies! Inlcuding Jam Drops by Lisa, the Apple Butterscotch and Anzac Cookies, Choc Chip Chai cookies by Marion, and Double Chocolate Macadamias.



Cupcake tower! Peanut Butter Cup Caramel Brownie cupcakes by Marion (there's a close up photo of those as well!), and Lisa made some Nutella and Carrot Cake Cupcakes.





Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies from Lisa and Berry Patch Brownies by me (from Let Them Eat Vegan by Dreena Burton, another bake sale faithful).



And Marion made these adorable Save A Cow cupcakes! How cute are they?



A shot of the table! We ended up raising $782 for Save A Cow, which was a fantastic outcome!



I was pretty hungry by the time we finished, but also pretty keen to get home, so I ordered a burger to takeaway. I got their special, a pulled BBQ jackfruit burger with kale slaw. When I got home I realised that instead of kale slaw on the burger, there was lettuce, so I guess they were out of slaw. But it was still really good. The jackfruit was delicious! And it had tomato and avocado and mayo on it. The best jackfruit burger I've had, I think.



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Playing peek-a-boo with a little Burmese hiding under a blanket.

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.