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"We get to be really creative, create all these really delicious things, and show people that veganism can be delicious and cute."- Ashley Rowe, Fat Bottom Bakery
I'm a big cupcake baker, lover and eater. I have a collection of cupcake cookbooks, cupcake displays, and cupcake carriers. I've also been cooking a lot of vegan recipes ever since I watched Food, Inc., and read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone.
You can imagine how excited I was to find out about Fat Bottom Bakery, a vegan bakery in Oakland, CA (where I live) that makes all kind of desserts, including cupcakes! Fat Bottom Bakery's creators, Ashley Rowe and Carolynn Webb, describe their bakery as, "a manifestation of our desire to spread delicious, cute, cruelty-free things to the world." They also produce the East Bay Vegan Bake Sale where they sell baked goods to raise money for charity.
I've posted an edited transcript of my interview with Ashley and Carolynn for the Big Vision Podcast. You can also listen to it on the little player below, on the Big Vision Podcast website, or on the iTunes Music Store.
Our conversation began with Carolynn and Ashley describing the path that brought them to start their own vegan bakery.
Carolynn Webb: Ashley and I had both been long time home bakers. One day Ashley was making me and our other friend, who shares the same birthday, some cupcakes. Our friend mentioned that we could probably sell them.
I feel like Ashley and I both have a really short list of things that we could do that would fit our interests, and also be exciting for us. It got added to the list, and we just thought more and more about it. After talking about it, living together, baking, and all that, we decided to try to do it.
Ashley Rowe: The first event right after that, where we decided to go and sell, was San Francisco Pride. The other part of the story was that the cupcakes I was making were rainbow-layered cupcakes. It came up as, "Oh, these are amazing. Everyone would love them at Pride. We should totally go sell them there." We realized that we could, and nothing was stopping us.
It blossomed from there. We made this cigarette girl tray, which we call the "cupcake girl tray," and took it out with us to sell in public. It had a great response, and ever since then we've been trying to find different local events, and branching out from there.
Britt Bravo: Why a vegan bakery?
AR: Well, both of us are vegan, and have been for many years. I think it's generally been appealing to us, and consistent with our ethics, at least in my opinion, to abstain from animal products. I think one of the great things about being a vegan bakery, and a vegan business, is that we get to go out into the public and show people that abstaining from something doesn't mean, necessarily, that you're losing out on anything.
We get to be really creative, create all these really delicious things, and show people that veganism can be delicious and cute. Of course, it's cruelty-free, which is the point.
CW: It's just one of the nicest ways to talk about veganism because it is always on our display, whether it's a table, or our cupcake girl trays. At almost every event someone will come up and be like, "I just ate that. It was good, and then I found out it was vegan and I was like, 'That is great.'" People have a particular idea of what something is going to taste like if it's vegan. People can try it, if they're interested, and also will accidentally get surprised. It's a nice way to talk about it.
BB: What
