About Me
Who Am I?
Hi, I’m Robin, the creator of the Vegan Dollhouse. If you like cute things, cooking/baking, and saving animals, then you’re in the right place! I’ll teach you how to make delicious vegan food that also super cute.
The Story of How Robin Went Vegan in 1999
This is my story of how I discovered veganism through my love of music.
My love of music began with metal when I was 12 or 13. I went to metal shows with my best friends Cheri and Nicole until I discovered pop punk a few years later. My mom was a chef and worked nights, so I would eat cold filet mignon for breakfast that she had brought home from work the night before. One night, Cheri and I were tripping on acid at a Denny’s, and I swore that her chicken breast sandwich looked like an actual chicken with legs and wings, and it was then that I started to question where meat comes from.
I slowly began omitting certain meats from my diet one by one, without any real knowledge of the meat and dairy industry. I started with hot dogs and hamburgers, because they were all ground up and it made me question what animal parts were really in there. And I just got pickier and pickier until I would only eat eggs after I had removed the umbilical cord that connected the yolk to the white, because it was too human.
I was basically a lacto avo vegetarian (the term vegan wasn’t mainstream back then, so there were just different kinds of vegetarians). I remember baking m&m cookies and bringing them to a punk house in Sac where my friend lived (and where I would be living later that year), and there was a crustpunk kid there with dreads named Crusty who asked me if they were vegan. That was the first time I had ever heard the word vegan. This was when I was in college, so it must have been around 1996. Sadly, it wasn’t until I was at Warped Tour in summer of 1999 that I wandered into the PETA booth and picked up a Vegan Outreach pamphlet and learned all about the dairy industry and how horrific it was. (Here’s a pic of me with Juliette Lewis from Warped Tour that year when she played with her band Juliette and the Licks.)
I went vegan as soon as I got home from that leg of Warped Tour (we must have gone to 3 or 4 shows in a row that year).
At that point, I had a 1 year old daughter, and a couple years later, had another daughter. Back then, raising vegan kids wasn’t common. Meeting other vegans wasn’t even common. I managed to track down a book written by Dr. Klaper that taught me some nutrition tips for raising vegan kiddos. And I learned about ingredients to avoid from punk zines.
When I first went vegan, there weren’t meat and dairy substitutes the way there are now. The only milk alternatives I remember were made of soy and rice (and to be honest, they weren’t good, haha). So, I had to learn how to cook real quick. Luckily, my mom was a chef, so she taught me a lot of kitchen skills. Then as the internet became more popular, I was able to track down other vegans to talk with and learn recipes from.
In the early 2000s, I became interested in the gothic lolita subculture, and after seeing Kamikaze Girls (with Amy), I made a couple lolita outfits. I couldn’t afford to buy one and just loved the dresses so much. This was about the time I started incorporating a kawaii aesthetic into my food as well. (In 2017, I did an interview with Super Cute Kawaii.)
I have always been into sharing food with people as a way to express my affection. I probably got that from my mom. I was always the one who brought vegan cupcakes and snacks to parties and craft nights. So, in 2010, I started a vegan cupcake blog to document all the cupcakes I made and to share recipes and pictures with friends who would ask to see them. It was hosted at ieatcupcakes.com, but I have since migrated all those posts over to tumblr to live. Then, in 2013, I decided that cupcakes were too limiting, and I wanted to challenge myself to make cute party food that was in other forms besides just cupcakes. And that is how vegandollhouse.com was born.
In 2015, I started cohosting a vegan podcast with my friend Ashley. It was called Dolls & Doughnuts and it lasted about 5 years until around 2020. That was also the year I left the SF Bay Area to return to the Sacramento area to have the the kitchen of my dreams (and so my rescue dog, Macchiato, could have the swimming pool of her dreams). When I’m not working at my full-time day job, I spend my free time decorating food, making clothes, organizing events (like vegan prom and tea parties), and ocassionally live streaming.
Oh, and I’m happy to report that as of now (December 31, 2023), both of my (now adult) daughters are still vegan.
Contact Me
Link to all my social channels or email me using the icons below. I LOVE hearing from people, so please reach out!
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YouTube
The majority of my YouTube are livestreams from a few years ago, but here’s a video from a collab I did with another creator.
Here are my three most popular posts on Instagram in the last 2 years. If you’d like to follow me there, I’m at @vegandollhouse