SF Vegan Bakesale & SF Food Wars!!!

Holy baking Batman!
This week was intense as far as baking goes. Thanks to our new friends at Vegansaurus and all the other amazing organizers at the SF Vegan Bakesale, we were able to donate a gang of baked goods for a great cause last weekend.
After a night of slaving over the oven and destroying our kitchen, we managed to come up with a couple batches of pumpkin bread, banana bread, chocolate cherry brownies, chocolate peanut butter cookies & of course our signature cinnamon rolls. Pumpkin AND original!

 
Within 2 hours we were sold out and estimated to have brought in about $275 for the kitties at Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue! That was just a small portion of the $2,600 (in 1 day!) raised by the other 50 amazing vegan bakers including  VegNews magazine, À Côté Restaurant, Sugar Beat Sweets, Violet Sweet Shoppe, Idle Hands Baking Company, Fat Bottom Bakery, Pure Life Chef, Mood for Food/Philip Gelb, Avi’s Vegan Treats, Laura Lemon, Brassica Supper Club, Ike’s Place, Love All Beings, Say It’s Not Soy & It’s Faturday.

On top of raising funds for the cause, 2 adorable kitties were able to find new homes as a result. How freakin’ awesome is that?!

Sunday… oh man. Where do I even start? OK, about a month ago we signed up to compete in a mini-cupcake contest held by SF Food Wars at the Stable Cafe. I thought it would be a good experience to enter a food competition and see what it was like even if the competition WAS NOT vegan.

Finally. The acceptance email! I was uber stoked to find out we’d been accepted considering our submission was vegan. Time to get our mother effin’ bake on!

 About a week before the competition we tried to get fancy with a recipe that totally ended up blowing. This was our one attempt at putting in any kind of effort to win. We tossed it and figured “Screw it, let’s just stick with what we know and have fun instead”. As a result of this decision, the 3 of us decided that going out the night before the competition and getting hammered off whiskey and tequila was a great idea. We’d get up early, throw some stuff together, mingle at the competition, pack it up, and go home. Riiiiiight.

6am, 2 hangovers and a fever later, we crawled out of bed and groaned throughout the entire baking process. We just barely wrapped things up on time and headed out with our “Vegan Blueberry Dragon Fruit Chocolate Ganache Cakes”. Fancy shmancy, eh?

Jeannie, the totally radical organizer, showed us to our table where we began setting up. We were stoked to be seated next to our veg friends at Fat Bottom Bakery (who’s creamsicle cupcakes were amazing by the way)!

 The whole experience was awesome despite the massive hangover and the fact I was trying not to hurl all over the cupcakes. 2 hours later and 170 full bellies… the votes were in! There were 6 prizes total. 1st, 2nd & 3rd place of course. Along with photographers choice, people’s choice and people’s choice honorable mention.

We packed up our stuff, set it aside and went to watch the winners. The next thing I know, we are being called up for the photographers choice award! < Insert shock and confusion here > No more than 2 minutes later, we were being called up again for 1ST PLACE! Completely baffled and about to pass out from excitement (or was it dehydration?), we gratefully accepted. Besides the Cooks Boulevard Baker’s Kit, a $25 certificate to Stable Cafe , a 1 year subscription to 7×7 Magazine, the Cupcakes cookbook,  The Cupcake Deck, the Method Kitchen Kit & a $50 gift certificate to Photojojo, we are going to have our recipe published on Chow.com! Holy crap!!!

I felt so honored to have won considering the competition was so tough. The creativity that went into some of the entries was incredible! The displays were gorgeous, the outfits were creative & all the recipes were very unique. There was an obvious amount of hard work and effort that each team put into their submissions. We were flattered to say the least. The best part? With tickets at $10 a pop and 170 sold (within an hour), we were happy to see the proceeds were being donated to the SF Food Bank!
I’m still asking myself “did a vegan cupcake seriously win over 18 other non-vegan cupcakes?” Another point proven. VEGAN FOOD ROCKS! Props to Nali Cupcakes, Corpulent Confections & Zaftig Sweets for holdin it down for all us vegans at SF Food Wars.

What an amazing experience for our first food competition!

It probably would have been even better if I actually liked cupcakes.

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