Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale

Every year around this time (April 21st-29th this year), vegans the world over hold bake sales to raise money for the charity or nonprofit organization of their choice. Since the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale phenomenon began a couple years back, I've been wanting our Memphis veg group, Food Awareness, to participate. But I was just lazy every year and let the bake sale dates pass me by without organizing one.

But this year, we changed all of that! Food Awareness held its first vegan bake sale on South Main during the monthly Art Trolley Tour, when hundreds of people crowd the downtown arts district for gallery receptions (with free wine!). That means lots of foot traffic, which is perfect for a bake sale.

Dawn Vinson helps set up our bake sale table. We eventually had to an extra table because we had so much stuff!

We decided to raise money for the Humane Society of Memphis & Shelby County because they do awesome work to help local injured, abused, or abandoned pups and kitties. After the four-hour bake sale, we raised $700 for the Humane Society!!

I put a call out to my baking friends on Facebook, and you wouldn't believe the response of people willing to help with this! We had some bakers who weren't even vegan but whipped up amazing vegan goods! I wish I could share pictures of everything, but if I did, this post would be ridiculously long. So I'll just share the items that photographed the best. Some were packaged in such a way that the pics didn't turn out clearly, so I'll just name those off sans photo.

I made three items — the Peanut Butter Blondies and Cowboy Cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar (neither pictured) and the Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Treats with Chocolate Chips from The Kind Diet:

Karina Khan, who bakes all of the cakes for Imagine Vegan Cafe and Nashville's Wild Cow Vegetarian Restaurant, donated a dozen big cupcakes, a few cream cheeze brownies, and about 100 mini cupcakes in several flavors!

Dawn Vinson of the Downtown Memphis Commission made Devil's Food Cupcakes:

And Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies with adorable Hello Kitty and Powerpuff Girl stickers. You can also see my Memphis Flyer co-worker Hannah Sayle's Peanut Butter Cups in the background:

Amy Schiller and her family brought these awesome Orange Cupcakes:

And a selection of adorably wrapped Earl Gray Shortbread, Peanut Butter Blondies, and Mexican Spiced Snickerdoodles:

Stephanie (Poopie Bitch) made Peanut Butter Oatmeal No-Bakes (not pictured) and Double Chocolate Mocha Cupcakes, which she wrapped individually in plastic cups and cellophane. People seemed to love the portability of these:

Vivian made melt-in-your-mouth Root Beer Cupcakes:

From the Southern Table bloggers Angela and Paul Knipple, who recently put out The World in a Skillet cookbook, brought some super-spicy Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies made with chipotle, cayenne, and a sea salt topping (not pictured) and Pumpkin Molasses Cookies:

There were also Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies by Shay Kearney, Peanut Butter Cornflake Balls by Katie Pemberton, and Snickerdoodles by Mike McKinney.

Lots of non-vegans stopped by our booth, gasping in amazement at how normal vegan desserts were! Some buyers were vegans and were thankful to find lots of egg-free, dairy-free treats for sale for a good cause. And others, like this guy Vaughan (plant costume guy) and I are talking to, were just looking for tips on cutting back on meat:

At the end of the night, we had made some new friends, sold about a three-fourths of our goodies, and raised a ton of money! Yea for vegan bake sales!