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.