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

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.

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)

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!

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…

Wew Weawwww!

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!

xo

A. Piecalypse

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