VegaNation go for a Coffee and Bake Key Lime Cookies.

  I took one of the children into town to do some errands and we treated ourselves to Soya De-Caff Vanilla Lattes while the others visited a duck pond and then went home and baked Key Lime Cookies.

  I would hardly call myself a vegan pioneer but I do remember that when we became vegan over twenty years ago, we did feel that we were giving up a lot of things in order to do the right thing. There was no reasonable vegan cheese, soya milk wasn't nearly reliably good as it is now- some brands were awful, vegan ice cream and yoghurt were terrible, thin and watery and horrible and as well as not being very nice, these things were not very widely available.
  Vegan cooking has come a long way too; when we became vegan there were very few vegan cook books and those there were tended to be quite dull in presentation, without photos, so they didn't exactly inspire or encourage! These days there is also a much wider choice of  vegan recipe books available; there are so many exciting vegan cooks out there these days, as well as the vast resources of the internet to help share vegan recipes and ideas and, now that there is a decent vegan cheese it's much easier to adapt vegetarian recipes as well, something that wasn't possible in the bleak days of  early vegan cheese replacement 'Veeze'..! An illustration of quite how vile this stuff was (sorry, Plamil- we love your chocolate!), is that I was once given a tray of it by my boyfriend-at-the-time, who worked in a wholefood co-op, because no-one (including me, later) could tell whether or not it had gone off..!! It was greyish and smelled faintly of fish, actually.. It was clearly an evolutionary cul-de-sac; no-one except us seems to even remember it!

   So, we have a very long way to go before we have the vegan world that we need, but all the same it's lovely, all these years after embarking on what felt at the time to be a slightly austere regime for the sake of animals, to be able to take my son out into a small, fairly conservative country town and buy him a vegan drink at a national coffee shop chain and then come home to Cauliflower Gratin made from a veganised recipe, and home made Key Lime Cookies!
    In our vegan shop VegaNation  www.veganation.co.uk , we sell yeast flakes which are often used to give a mild cheesy taste to vegan dishes and two different kinds of egg replacer as well as black salt which adds an eggy taste to vegan cooking such as pancakes and french toast. So, today veganism is as much about animals as ever but, thank goodness, we no longer have to eat 'Veeze'!