Cheap and impressive recipes needed for omni cake sale!

[ashleyandbarry]

Hi everyone,

My husband works in social housing, and they're organizing a cake sale(bake sale for us Americans!) to benefit Shelter, and we want to impress the hell out of everyone by showing how awesome vegan baked goods can be. Does anyone have any great recipes they'd like to pass on? I'd love to find really cheap things, so that I can make tons, and stuff that will fool any omnivore. Pretty food is a plus! :) It doesn't have to just be cakes- cookies, bars, etc. are fine. Thanks in advance!

[Quantum Mechanic]

I'm not too good at baking (never really tried it much, aside from once or twice over holiday), but if you have an ice cube tray or similar form, and a couple of pots you could use as a double boiler, then you could melt chocolate, add nuts and dried fruits and such (I add agave nectar during melting, which helps sweeten and I believe helps with the textural properties of the chocolate), and I combined rice milk with the melted chocolate and agave nectar as it melted, put it in the ice cube tray to make it go into shapes, and it was pretty fudge-like (according to American impression of fudge) when it had solidified. While it's still melted, we found that it greatly improved the taste of some brownies that had an odd texture and a lot of cinnamon (my parents said it tasted like a holiday cake, not so much like a brownie - fortunately since there' vegan food at the cafeteria and I split a vegan brownie with them at orientation even though we were omni, I think they were amenable to the idea that the way it came out wasn't because it was "vegan" - many other people would not give that same benefit of the doubt, without that direct experience, and of course even the cafeteria desserts are variable - sometimes hard as rock and sometimes nice and tasty). So I can only speculate at what spreading the melted chocolate onto a very brownie-like brownie would be!

[harpy]

Cherry, who's on the forum, has some cake recipes on her website that might suit?

http://www.parsleysoup.co.uk/list.php?category=cakes

[veganista]

I'd recommend The Cake Scoffer by Ronnie if you've got time to send off for it before your cake sale. It's a great little book with very simple and easy to follow recipes and it only costs £1 :)
lhttp://www.vegetarianguides.co.uk/products/thecakescoffer.shtml

[ashleyandbarry]

Thank you all!

Veganista, what part of Sussex are you in? We used to live in Hastings!

[Agatha]

The Vegan CupCakes Take over the World book has some easy peasy recipes and a lot of them involve cheap ingredients. you don't have to go in for all the fancy topics but instead give them a quick frosting.

The Joy of Vegan Cookery has a delicious sponge recipe too.