APieCalypse Now!

The Food Fair and Other Cool News!

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:11:15 +0000

WOW!
So it has been a long while since I sat down to write a blog for the bakery… but I have a great reason…
I HAVE BEEN SO BUSY!!!

This past weekend was the Toronto Vegetarian Food Festival at the Harbourfront Center! the Food fest is one of my favourite weekends ever of the ENTIRE year. Usually I am there as a volunteer but this weekend I decided to throw myself into the fray and go as a vendor. What an amazing response I have received! Everyone was so nice. We were definitely the black sheep of the bakeries, as a friend put it when they came by the stand (most of the other bakeries have things like matching shirts and printed signs, etc) BUT what we lack in coloured vinyl we more than made up for with heart and punkrock energy!

It was a near sellout weekend for me so that was incredible in itself. I had taken over 400 marshmallows and 200 cookies with me, and one by one I watched them happily walk away from the stands in the hands of kids and adults alike, each usually with the same mission to “get the one with the most chocolate in it.”

Aside from all the cookies and sweets I was also happy to be promoting some really important stuff at the booth this year! We had on the table literature and QR codes to view the trailer for Maximum Tolerated Dose, a documentary feature being made in Toronto that I get prouder by the day to be working on with Karol O (the ex-host of Animal Voices and the genius behind “Garbageface“) If you were by the stall this weekend we was the helper there all 3 days wearing his Vegan Police T-Shirt Collection.

The other thing we had going on was the mailing list and pamphlets for M.A.D. which is the Marine Land Animal Defence. I love the activists at MAD and following their work on Facebook this summer has really lit a fire under me. If all animal activists worked as hard as these dedicated people have this year, we’d all have a lot less work to do, that is for sure. Please like them on facebook and sign up for their mailing list!

Please stay tuned the next few days for some more exciting news and updates!! and THANK YOU EVERYONE who came out!

xoxo

Jen

Suport for a new book about an important story

admin — Thu, 19 May 2011 22:41:15 +0000

Hi Everyone!
SO a new contact/friend of mine Josh Harper is working to put out a book chronicling the history of the Animal Rights Movement! In order to do his important research and do publish the book he is looking for some community support on kickstarter.

Link here!

He has this to say when I asked him for a short blurb about the project:

“You like delicious baked goods, but do you like delicious baked good with a side of intriguing history? Of course you do, and to insure that you get to eat fabulous goodies while being deeply engrossed in a tome about lost animal rights history you should jump on over to Kickstarter and send me a few bucks to author the aforementioned book! Not only will you have my eternal gratitude, but you can get some neat gifts for helping out.”

I think that sums it up especially nicely. Josh is a SERIOUSLY nice person, and extremely dedicated to this cause. Like (or lump) some of his other choices, I personally respect his enthusiasm, his desire to help document this history, and the nature of the work in general. Having written my Master’s Thesis on vegetarian and vegan identity, I know first hand how little information there actually is about these communities/movements and the messages and objectives they have. Rather than leave it to others to interpret what has happened into an unchecked kluge of hearsay, I believe that whether you end up agreeing of disagreeing with the position of the AR community or not, it is invaluable for the story to be told well, and fully, and I’m confident that Josh has the ability to do so.

I myself support this project and I hope that others consider it as well. Even if you aren’t on an activist yourself, even if you aren’t even a vegan or vegetarian, this movement, like many others, is plagued by misinformation or a lack of information, and any step in the direction of in-depth analysis, clarity, understanding, and context in a world dominated usually by raw ungrounded factoids, 3 paragraph press releases, headlines and soundbites is a refreshing project to be a part of.

Please consider throwing a couple dollars his way if you feel so inclined.

NEW VIDEO!

admin — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:47:02 +0000

Karol has made me another WONDERFUL AWESOME VIDEO to share with you all. This time we are making SGT. PEPPERMINT PATIES! The song is by The Locust and it is thrash punk, so heads up on that… in case your speakers aren’t at full volume right now. (haha)

Check more of Karol’s work out at Decipher Images

SO MANY THINGS!

admin — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:59:32 +0000

So, there are LOTS of things to write about. LOTS. I think in the interest of keeping things manageable I am going to have to go with a couple of updates over the next few days, but first things first:

WE ARE OPEN!!!
(well, we were open…)

Lots of people on twitter and on facebook ask where they can find the amazing (and they are amazing) apple pies, brownies, squares and other treats that we make. Look no further! The Farmer’s Market Season has started and you can now get your vegan pie fix in two markets in Toronto!

Every Sunday I will be manning the booth at the Distillery District Farmer’s Market! We are booth #4, right across from the Distillery Market store, and across from one of the lovely coffee shops (seems fitting.) Each week I will bring at least 1 dozen 9″ organic, local, fair-trade vegan apple pies, and a whole whack of 6″ mini-two person pies… as well as some other pie flavours as the fruit comes into season. I will also always have “I can’t believe it’s not Butter Tarts” (Named by my favourite Barista, Tyler at TeAro Roasted ) and at least one kind of brownie or square!

Starting Thursday June 2nd I will be at the U of T Farmer’s Market selling mostly 6″ pies and squares, tarts and cookies! Each week I’m going to try to bring something a bit different to that market since I have a feeling that there will be more regulars, and other grad students (like myself) looking for studying fuel!

Please come by and see me! Sometime in June as well I will be ramping things up a bit more to accommodate deliveries and more wholesale orders as they come in. So far the response have been really positive and I am looking forward to sharing these yummy desserts with everyone!

In OTHER AWESOME NEWS… I have my logo, OFFICIALLY!
I had really spent a long time mulling over the idea of a logo, and how exactly to find something that both fit the bakery, but also fit me too! There is no better feeling than supporting your friends and your community as well, so I had hoped in a perfect world to be able to do that as well… Enter my good friend Matt Gauck! He is the genius illustrator behind the logo for Marineland Animal Defence, the gorilla on the latest Vegan Police t-shirts, the designer of the “This War Has Two Sides” poster for VeganTHIS as well as the fundraising posters for Will Potter’s “Green Is The New Red” Book and ongoing blog/project (among many other equally cool causes/movements/projects… on top of his own very cool work.) As well, for me, I felt good supporting a fellow vegan artist, really keep this whole bakery as on-point as possible. We also were able to do most of back-and-forth electronically, so there was no wasted paper, and Matt uses mostly found or secondhand materials for all his painting, drawing and art, as well as gets everywhere he is going by bike. So this logo is as green as possible in that regard as well!

I was really happy when Matt agreed to pen me a cool something-something for ApieCaplypse Now! Vegan Bakery and so we set out to converse and think up something very awesome. I wish I could take more credit for the design, the concept, really any of it, but thruthfully I mostly contributed by enthusiastic thumbs ups at my computer screen and exclamations of “OH MAN! I LOVE IT SO MUCH!”

At any rate, I have yet to incorporate this officially into a traditional logo, but it is currently on all my labels, and if you see me biking around, I have a stack of stickers in my back pocket pretty much all the time… and I will give you one!

Next update I will fill everyone in on how the very first market went (spoiler alert, it was INTENSE) and outline the upcoming plan for this weeks attempt #2! I also will be profiling some of my cook market helpers and their cool projects and work!

Thanks for reading everyone! So happy to be out there and to be selling all these great treats to you all!

xoxo

Jen

Tussle n’ Flow!

admin — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:31:36 +0000

Unfortunately I have been really really sick these last few weeks with pneumonia, and as a result the mixer has been off, the cookbooks closed, and I have mostly been watching SpongeBob on the sofa with a near endless supply of gingerale. (A special thanks to all the folks on twitter who have sent me well wishes! Warms my heart, it does.)

Sickness aside, the fires of hell themselves could not have kept me from Tussle n’ Flow on Saturday to fundraise for my good friend Karol’s upcoming film on vivisection. The film (which I have mentioned before) is called “Maximum Tolerated Dose” (which is a lab term used for the dosage amount of any drug or substance that an animal can withstand before it becomes lethal, has an irreversible adverse effect, or the point at which the animal dies of a side effect.) This kind of testing is incredibly cruel and hard on the animals as they often spend a lot of time near the limit, suffering from the drug overdose, but still administered more to see where the boundaries for fatality are. Karol has also explained that they do both long and short term toxicity tests, which can sometimes see the animal taking a high dose for 2-3 years to project long-term side effects and fatality rates.

The film name is a reference to that but as Karol has also pointed out it references the point many AR activists and Veg*n’s alike have come to.. that moment where the other shoe drops and you decide definitively you just can’t put that milk on your cereal again. You can’t buy that leather. You’ve hit the point at which there is no return. So I like that a lot too. (And from my experiences talking to people, some of the coolest stories you’ll hear are the ones where people tell you what that final straw was, the day that the switch in their mind flipped the other way.)

MAXIMUM TOLERATED DOSE [trailer] from decipher films on Vimeo.

To hear more about the film you can read this interview over at the WONDERFUL Our Hen House site which can be found here: Maximum Tolerated Dose: Q&A with Filmmaker Karol Orzechowski by Nick in Art of the Animal

(You should also be reading Our Hen House regularly if you are into animal rights news and/or general awesomeness. I LOVE Our Hen House. You’ll LOVE Our Hen House. Everyone will LOVE Our Hen House.)

The fundraiser also coincided with the closing of another great space in this city for progressive thinking as well as art and general awesomeness: Project 165. So it was a big one. The place was packed and I bundled up to go through the blizzard and deliver 50 vegan butter tarts to help fundraise. As well, there were 3 MCs and a DJ throughout the evening and lot and lots of dancing. I also got challenged to a bake-off, which I will accept as soon as my lungs are back in full operational order.

At any rate, here are some pictures from the evening! The time to Tussle n’ flow has passed. Time to take it to the next step, hustle and grow friends. Hustle and grow.

Baby Fudge!

admin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:53:49 +0000

So a couple of dear friends are about to have their very first baby! About a week ago we all headed over to shower the expecting mama-to-be with gifts, food and a really rousing round of birth-themed pictionary (which our team totally dominated at.)

I used the opportunity to veganize my moms kickass fudge recipe from when I was a kid, and the results were AWESOME!

Here’s the Fudge:

And a few from the party!

A VIDEO!

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 03:06:17 +0000

So my good friend Karol from Decipher Film and Photo (on facebook, on vimeo) came to visit and made this great video in my apartment! This isn’t my bakery, this is my house… but the tarts are the same as will be available for sale. Also if you are sensitive to blocks that spell out swear words you might want to avert your eyes for a few seconds near the beginning…

Vegan Butter-Tarts with Jennai of APieCalypse Now!

Making Vegan Butter Tarts with APIECALYPSE NOW! BAKERY from decipher films on Vimeo.

http://apiecalypsenow.com
http://decipherimages.com

music by OFF!

http://offofficial.com

Wew Weawwww!

Chinese New Year!

admin — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:45:01 +0000

So, a new Chinese New Year is upon us! I am a huge fan of the chinese calendar (Rat 4 life!) I decided to celebrate by making some treats. So I made…

Vegan Cinnamon Buns (with Betta’-than Butta’-creme frosting!)

As you can see, it’s hard not to be happy with this choice!

Here are some more shots of the buns in action… in action being really awesomely delicious I should say…
they don’t do much else.

Veguary!

admin — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:36:17 +0000

Happy Veguary everyone!

So, for the month of February I have tasked myself with baking something new every day to get my recipes all perfect and such for the upcoming launch (which has been delayed by the fact that my Master’s thesis is still not yet finished, and is therefore holding up my ability to start accepting orders… these are the problems with having two overlapping passions!) At any rate, even though I can’t yet be baking for everyone out there, I am baking for Teapot and my other close friends and as a result I have found some wonderful new recipes!! I have been working to veganize the whole little folder of recipes that my mother gave me when I moved out for university a few years back, and so far nothing has been impossible (though some things aren’t quite right yet… like these little almond cookies that call for egg whites… my imitation egg whites that I recently invented unfortunately melt when heated too fast… and that molten almond paste and sugar may have caused my oven to catch fire on Sunday night… and that fire could have filled my apartment with black smoke… that might have happened…)

But moving on from the failures to the successes, starting tomorrow I’ll be posting some pictures of treats to come as well as some of the events I have been baking for in the Toronto area these last few weeks. I am behind on this blog but I am hoping to get better about posting in the days to come.

Hope everyone is great!

A. Piecalypse

Getting ready to launch

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:16:00 +0000

So, it has been a long time coming, and after a number of small set-backs it looks like the Apiecalypse is nearly ready to be unleashed. I am hoping for a February 1st launch of the online store, and this spring to be in farmer’s markets in the Toronto area. I have been receiving a lot of good support from friends who I would be lost without. Sometime in the next two weeks I hope to do my first few runs of some of the really special things I’ve been cooking up.

Basically, get ready for something really cool. I have been brainstorming with my good friend who is a vegan chef recently transplanted in Toronto from Vancouver and we have some really innovative stuff on the horizon. Now, truthfully, some of it will no doubt fail spectacularly in the beginning, but that is the price you pay for trying to forge some new paths I think. The awesme vegan community that surrounds me right now has been really encouraging of the risk taking as well (there is more to vegan baking than cupcakes and cookies, though sometimes it doesn’t seem that way… I promise, I haven’t had a cupcake since the summer and my blood sugar is regularly spiked by some delicious vice.) Basically, I am saying I know it is a slow start, but I’d rather is be slow and potentially yield some groundbreaking new stuff for your lovely vegan mouths than to just come out of the gates with a lot of the same old same old. So if you are with me, I promise it’ll be worth the wait!

Here’s to February!

Jennai