VeganMoFo 2019 #4: B is for Bake Sale

I used to organise a lot of vegan bake sales to raise money for different animal charities in Brisbane. At one point, I was doing one a month, but then I burnt out. I slowed down to organising one a year, and baking for some others, but this year I've just stuck to baking for them rather than organising. It has made it fun again, rather than stressful. This post is about some stuff I baked for a recent bake sale raising money for Cranky's Farm, a local farm animal sanctuary. You can see other posts about bake sales I've either organised or baked for here.

S'mores Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero: I've never had traditional s'mores, they seem to be a very American thing, but I have had s'more inspired things. In these cupcakes, the cake part is made out of graham crackers (or Digestives in this case as I can't get graham crackers), the buttercream frosting stands in for the marshmallow, and there is a chocolate topping as well. The batter is very runny, I ended up using a jug to pour it into the cupcake liners, and this resulted in a very soft and moist cupcake. I made a half recipe of the buttercream for topping them, but for some reason had to add a lot of extra icing sugar this time for it to be firm enough. It was meant to be piped, but didn't pipe well, so I smoothed it with an icing spatula. I maybe ended up putting a bit too much icing sugar in, it ended up quite firm, but this actually worked very well as a marshmallow stand in. I topped it with biscuit crumbles, chocolate shavings, and chocolate sprinkles, and stuck a mini marshmallow and a chocolate chunk on top of each one.
Rating: :)



(Espresso) Chip Oatmeal Cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero: Of course I took the espresso out of these, instead making them a Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookie. They had cocoa powder in them already, which I doubled, and I added in one tsp of cinnamon instead of the espresso. This makes a very sloppy dough, so I ended up chilling it in the fridge for a while to thicken. I used an AU TBS as my scoop, and got 20 cookies that I baked for 20 minutes.
Rating: :)



Gold Bar Cookies from Vegan On The Cheap by Robin Robertson: These are more a slice than a cookie, with a base of oats and peanut butter (and other things of course), then topped with some golden jam (apricot in this case) and raisins (I used sultanas) and roasted peanuts, then more of the base mixture crumbled on top. The jam got absorbed into the topping a lot, so wasn't a distinct layer on its own. But this was a very nice combination of flavours.
Rating: :)





Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Gizmo on her 15th birthday. I gave her this bed, which became a fast favourite of hers. She loved it! Though so did Sahara, who would sneak into it when she could.