Bath Vegan Festival

Soda bread, fresh from the oven.

Last week, I lamented the fact I should have been attending Bath Vegan Festival. Pip to the rescue. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have a vegan food festival here, without leaving the kitchen!’ she said, well trained as she was from the previous weekend’s activities. And so we did. But lest we forget I’m Can’t Cook Will Cook, so the results were fair to middling.

I made aquafaba vegan mayonnaise (failed). Seitan (not my finest batch) and a Rebel Recipes loaf of soda bread (foolproof, even now I’ve run out of some ingredients and am making do with alternatives).

Homegrown cress on homemade bread. Cress is the only thing we’ve successfully homegrown so far.

Pip wanted to make gingerbread cookies using her cookie cutters, so I flicked through my extensive collection of vegan recipe books until I found a raw gingerbread and raisin recipe. It was supposed to look like this…

But it didn’t, did it? Because at a vegan food festival, we’re fed by people who know what they’re doing. At Kim and Pip’s Kitchen Food Festival, we’re fed by me.

We didn’t have raisins, so I used goji berries and let me tell you, the result was a waste of goji berries.

Mum sampled one and summed it up best. ‘I wouldn’t call them brilliant.’

I would have walked right past this stall.

They crumbled, but not in a good way. We couldn’t roll them out for our cookie cutters so we had to squish them into shape. Who knew cookies could be so annoying.

The big success of the day was a Rebel Recipes chestnut and ginger cake with peanut butter frosting. We had a packet of chestnuts left over from Christmas and I never thought I’d find a use for them, but this recipe was a winner even though I did a massive boo boo.

After the cake had been in the oven for the allotted time, I did the skewer test, only to find it very wet in the middle. I gave it another five minutes. Same problem. Another five minutes. It was now burning on top but still soggy in the middle. Wondering why I bother making cakes when they’re so bloody tricky, I called my brother, a cake master chef. He asked me to read out the ingredients. A lot of wet ingredients there, he surmised. This is the difference between us. I’ve never given any thought to the wet / dry ingredient ratio. Jae suspects this cake should be baked low and slow. Are you sure the recipe says 200 in a fan assisted oven, he asks. YES, I shout, annoyed at cakes, general. I double check the recipe. SHIT. 160 in a fan assisted oven! Low and slow!

Imagine being able to diagnose a baking error over the phone. This is why Jae bakes all the cakes in our family.

Thanks to the emergency phone call, the oven was turned down and the result? Not the prettiest thing to look at, especially as I didn’t wait for the cake to cool before I added frosting and then found out why you wait for a cake to cool before you add frosting (it melts and looks shit). But absolutely delicious.

We used Pip & Nut coconut almond for the peanut butter frosting and it was SO good. Made all the more tasty by the fact we had a tea and cake party with my friend Amy, who went out (on a Boris approved mission) to buy herself a slice of cake too, so we could do a video call while we all ate cake and drank tea. I could have cried, it was so cute.

The primary reason I go to any food festival is for the free samples so I was delighted that Metcalfe’s took pity on my house prison and posted some popcorn to try. Verdict - a more-ish, low cal, high taste snack which had me assuring my sister it was okay that our gingerbread cookies were rubbish because we had Safety Popcorn. When in doubt, bring out the Safety Popcorn.

So, with a hefty dollop of imagination, it was just like wandering around a food festival, except I got a bit more stressed, I didn’t get to high-five any other vegans and I didn’t leave the house.