By Phoebe Billing
Georgia Irwin is re-inventing vegan home baking with one delicious dessert after another, combining peninsula produce and childhood memories to create her recipe for success.
Ten years ago, being vegan often meant completely cutting delicious home-style sweet treats from your diet. No more cheesecake, cookies, or ice cream. Fast-forward to today, where Georgia Irwin’s home-bakery is providing those oh-so delicious sweet goodies for the Peninsula’s vegan foodies.
Georgia Irwin, otherwise known as @TheKindnessEchoes to her combined 200 plus thousand Instagram and TikTok followers, is reinventing classic desserts to suit the vegan diet whilst also maintaining the true essence of the dish. Because being vegan doesn’t mean you have to cut out sugar. “Lemon tarts, cinnamon buns, doughnuts. That nostalgic bakery style food. Those are the kind of things people don’t want to give up if they go vegan,” Georgia says.
After growing up in Gippsland, Georgia made the move to the Mornington Peninsula five years ago, sourcing inspiration for her recipes from the peninsula’s local produce and combining that with her childhood memories, growing up in country Victoria. “I knew my passion was around creating foods that I’d had at an Australian country bakery growing up,” Says Georgia. “So that was my goal; I knew I wanted to make food that connected with my childhood.”
I knew my passion was around creating foods that I’d had at an Australian country bakery growing up
From vegan cheesecakes to vegan yoyos, Georgia is creating a vegan alternative for almost all nostalgic bakery goods everyone enjoyed as a kid, and she is mostly doing so with peninsula sourced produce. “I always try really hard to use local or organic ingredients,” says Georgia. “The Mornington Peninsula is such a big food bowl. The local produce is incredible. Basically, everything that I need, I can access here. From olive oil to fruit and veg, it’s all just around the corner.”
When creating recipes for her cookbook, The Vegan Homebaker, which debuted last year, Georgia was solely using locally sourced produce. Whether that was from a farm gate or her neighbours fruit tree, it was all grown right here on the Peninsula. The Vegan Homebaker launched with great success and is available for purchase in most bookstores and online.
Georgia describes the time spent writing the cookbook as an amazing and incredible experience, but reflects on the stress and pressure of releasing a book for the first time. “I knew I had a really big responsibility in putting these recipes out. I knew that I was vegan and I really wanted this book to be special for people that were vegan,” says Georgia. After two years writing the cookbook full time, it was released in September 2023.
Looking back on those years, Georgia says the anxiety and pressure she placed on herself was overwhelming, but she didn’t let that get in the way of her goal: to create a cookbook that would become a staple in all vegan households with recipes that “matched up” with the original recipes she had grown up with. “I didn’t want it to be a book where people just had an okay option. I wanted it to match up with original food or the original recipes that I’d grown up with”.
Since the release of The Vegan Homebaker, Georgia has reopened her home-bakery and reappeared in local Peninsula markets like the Shoreham market, and Melbourne city markets such as The Big Vegan Market. “My favorite market that I always attend, if I can, is the Shoreham market. It’s a really beautiful market to go to,” Georgia says. As well as this, her home-bakery is open for orders which customers can access through Georgia’s Instagram page.
Social media, Georgia says, has allowed for her personality to shine through her baking. By placing herself in front of a camera for huge audiences to connect with enables her brand to remain personal and flexible, “It’s been such an amazing platform for me. There is no way I could have achieved what I wanted to achieve without social media.”
Looking ahead to the new year, Georgia has plans to open a new website for customers to access her recipes online, “I love my home bakery and I want to continue that, but I also love the idea of people cooking vegan at home,” says Georgia. “I know that I can access more people when I can give away a recipe online.”
For now, you can find Georgia’s vegan creations, market dates, and recipes via her Instagram and TikTok.
IG: @thekindnessechoes