My First Advertisement

This July, Augusta Vegan Bakery will turn two years old! To prepare for this milestone, I have a long list of goals and ideas I'm hoping will help the business continue to grow and flourish. One goal of mine is to spread the word about the bakery. It doesn't matter how delicious or wonderful your product is if no one knows about it! I thought a great place to start would be advertising through blogs that have a similar focus and ethical standing to my company.

My first ad!

Recently, I came across a new blog that fit my criteria perfectly: Rose Pedals Vegan Weddings. Not only am I thrilled by this blog as a vegan bride-to-be, but as a business owner, too. Rose Pedals features all kinds of wonderful and inspiring content for those planning a vegan wedding. So far, I've been impressed by the blog's content, and I'm looking forward to reading more in the future. It seemed like the perfect fit for my first ad, so I went for it! Fiancé and I used one of my newer photos to make the banner ad. We wanted something simple and pretty, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. The ad went live yesterday! Below is how the ad looks on Rose Pedals.

A screen grab from Rose Pedals. You can see my ad on the right!

I'm excited to see what happens now. Maybe there won't be much of a change at all, but it can't hurt to try, and I've got to start somewhere. My fingers are crossed! In the meantime, definitely do check out Rose Pedals Vegan Weddings. There's a bunch of great articles up already, and I'm sure they'll keep coming!

Engagement Photoshoot!

My apologies in advance for the fact that this post is rather unrelated to the topic of vegan baking, but I would be remiss if I did not share our wonderful engagement photos with you! We worked with the lovely Teale Landstedt of Teale Photography, who did a wonderful job photographing us and editing the pictures. We also had the help of Krystel of Couture Events with the styling, and she did a wonderful job as always. You can check out both their blogs for more images, here and here.  I am so happy with how they turned out, and I hope you like them too.

There are many more where that came from! Be sure to visit Teale's blog to see the whole set. Let me know what you think!

More Cupcakes!

Well, our engagement photo shoot went off without a hitch! If you read my post about upcoming projects, you know that I had a lot to do to prepare! One of the settings for the shoot was a picnic, and naturally we wanted to have some pretty baked goods as props. So, a few days before, I prepared two types of cupcakes to use. We wound up only using one (the chocolate), but I think they both turned out pretty. In the hulaballoo of it all, though, I didn't manage to snap pictures of the prettiest ones. I did take shots of some of the leftovers, though, so those'll have to do for now.

Cupcake Friends!

The first type of cupcake was a double chocolate buttercream with chocolate shavings on top. This flavor is based off a cake I enjoyed a little too often back in my pre-vegan days; Alcove Cafe's See's Chocolate Candy Cake. It was (and probably still is to non-vegans) ridiculously rich and delicious. Basically, it's a rich chocolate cake with pieces of See's chocolate in it, covered with rich buttercream frosting, and topped with melted chocolate and chocolate shavings. Sounds decadent, right? When I first went vegan, one of my first missions was to veganize this cake. It went very well. You can read all about that at my old blog, here. It only seemed natural to make this a cupcake, since I'm pretty sure I based the recipe off a cupcake recipe in the first place. I love it when things are cyclic. And so, the double chocolate buttercream cupcake was born! The double chocolate comes from the chocolate chips inside the cake, if you were wondering.

Double-Chocolate Cupcake with Buttercream Frosting

The second cupcake was a vanilla agave cupcake. I love the flavor of agave, it sort of reminds me of what the lovechild of maple syrup and honey would taste like. It's so warm and sweet! It blended really nicely with the vanilla flavors, too. This cake was moist and flavorful! For frosting, I did a repeat of the buttercream, as the recipe makes SO MUCH frosting. I think that next time, though, I might try a glaze of some sort, or something a little less sweet. The two tasted good together, but I think that a better pairing might remain to be seen.

Vanilla Agave Cupcake

All in all, I'm very pleased with how these turned out! The flavors were great, and everyone seemed to love them. With a few more trials, I'll be ready to add these and the pumpkin cupcakes to the Etsy shop! I just need to figure out how to ship that frosting...