Portsmouth Vegan Festival.

I'm not vegan, but when I found out there was a vegan festival just across the water, it was too good an opportunity to miss. I'm really into all sorts of alternative diets, maybe except raw vegan diet, so I was really excited about going to the Festival and trying all the delicious food. The venue was absolutely packed, and the queue outside ridiculously long, which probably proves how much demand there is for such events.

I have to say that cake and chocolate were the dominant food item at the stalls. No complaints here, I absolutely love cake. There was sheer insanity of different types of sweet treats, starting with classic cakes, like banoffee, through tarts, cheesecakes and biscuits, to energy balls and protein bars.

Cake! And more cake!

I tried blueberry no-cheesecake from the South Coast Confectionary. It was my first vegan cheesecake and I can't tell I was particularly impressed. The thing it, the cake was not particularly bad or anything (though the base made of dates was overly sweet and too strong a taste for my liking), but it just lacked the wonderful creaminess that a normal cheesecake has. It was sweet and did the job as an after lunch dessert, but I wouldn't actively choose it to have it again. Despite the high sugar content, I didn't want another piece. So I'm not particularly convinced by vegan baking: honey cinnamon cookies are fine, but in general I feel like I do prefer to have an option of adding eggs, butter or cream cheese in.

Jackfruit was a great mystery to both my friend and myself, but it was everywhere! Apparently you can use as a substitute for anything, so we had bbq jackfruit bap. Interesting flavours, though I enjoyed kale coleslaw the most (rather surprisingly, because I'm not particularly fond of kale). Another discovery involves seitan, though this resembled fatty parts of meat too much for my liking.

Apart from food stalls, there were some stalls with assorted jewellery, vegan clothing, health and beauty products, animal rights information and so on.

 There were cookery demos as well: we went to Easy raw vegan dinner. I must say that although I could probably be convinced by raw chocolate and avocado mousse, raw curry is definitely a no-no. It simply doesn't taste like a curry, but rather like an overly-spiced salad. Not nice at all. Curry should be cooked, that's sort of the point of curry. However, there were some great things to eat there, for instance I gave sweet potatoes brownies a go and those were delicious.

This stall had sweet potato brownies, which I'm determined to make at some point, because they were DELICIOUS.

I have actually made the chocolate mousse at home, it's easy-peasy. Not too sweet, which is a good thing, because I'm quitting sugar (more about it in the near future). Definitely doesn't taste like a proper chocolate mousse, but it's good enough to satisfy my evening dessert cravings and can be classed as healthy, since it has avocados and (added) chia seeds.

Will I go to a vegan festival again? Definitely yes. There's a lot to see and learn there, even though I have no intention to actually go fully vegan. Eggs for breakfast help me to get through the day and the prospect of scrambled tofu is not particularly appealing. But it's definitely an interesting experience.

My top tips?

1. Get there early: to avoid standing at the back of a massive queue.
2. Get there hungry: because there is so much food to try, you really want to have enough space for a few snacks.
3. Get  round the entire venue first, if possible, to get a general feel as to what there is and what you would like to try.
4. Make most of the demos and talks.
5. Keep hydrated: I got a terrible headache that day, because in all this madness I forgot to drink!
6. Have your own containers to get some goodies back home and reduce waste at the same time.

A list of vegan festivals can be found here.