Vegan Bake Sale For Japan Recap
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Last Sunday Vegas Veg held a vegan bake sale to raise money for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
The event was a success! We “raised dough” for charity and we inspired people to choose vegan. A win-win.
We had chocolate chip cookies, brownies (some with nuts, some without, some gluten-free), lemon bars, almond cupcakes (gluten-free), Mexican wedding cookies, vanilla cupcakes, banana bread (soy-free), magic bars, and apple pie.
Of course, everything was completely vegan.
We each used our favorite recipes. The vanilla cupcakes were from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, the lemon bars were from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, the chocolate chip cookies were from The Vegan Family Cookbook.
I also overheard some people talking about these fantastic cookbooks for vegan baking:
Donations came from Vegas Veg volunteers as well as from Veg Out Las Vegas and Chef Mayra. We followed the tips recommended at the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale website.
And even though I forgot a few things (like forks and a boombox for music) and didn’t do everything perfectly (I can get frazzled sometimes), we did enough right. The event was a complete success!!!
We held the bake sale outside of a local vegan-friendly business, Atomic #7. This helped us tremendously because it was a familiar location to many vegans and vegetarians who helped spread the word about the bake sale. They were able to give good, accurate directions to friends and family members.
Vegas Veg member, Kaori, who went vegan for health reasons, donated almond cupcakes and a whole bunch of origami! She even spent some time teaching a few of us how to fold a star.
Photographer May Coffman took some excellent photos while the rest of us snapped pix with our phones. May’s professional website is http://www.maycoffman.com/.
One of the bake sale customers shared with me the fact that her parents lost their home in the tsunami and are staying with relatives. She wanted to go comfort them and help rebuild, but she’s fearful of returning to Japan right now with her children while the warnings of nuclear contamination are still so high. She said, if not for her children, she would be in Japan helping her parents. Her story reminded me of my husband’s; his parents lost their homes in Katrina.
Our bake sale earned hundreds of dollars for people like her parents in Japan. Prior to the event, we took a vote to determine which charities to send the proceeds to. We decided to divide it 50/50 for humans and animals. The money we raised will go to Doctors Without Borders and Kinship Circle Animal Disaster Aid Fund. The runner-up was the Japanese Red Cross, which we encourage donations be made directly to them.
The event was quite a crowd-pleaser, attracting a wide variety of people of all classes, races, and ages. Vegan food can be a bridge-builder. We even had a couple dogs stop by to say hello. The dogs were rescues, of course.
It was a lot of fun and we’ll definitely be doing more vegan bake sales in the future.
The packaging of those brown rice cupcakes is beautiful! Everything looks delish. Wish I could have been there.
UPDATE: after re-counting the money and last-minute donations, we actually earned $500, not $400!