Allergy Friendly Baking Fails

I go on and on here about how much I love OIT because I can eat all the food I couldn’t while I had food allergies. A prime example is allergy friendly baking.

Imagine being told you had to construct a building but couldn’t use cement, steel, or bricks. That’s what allergy friendly baking feels like.

Ingredients like flour, eggs, and dairy make up not only the flavor, but the structure of most baked goods. Luckily, we have a lot of resources nowadays that explain how to substitute allergy friendly ingredients and still get delicious treats. After my diagnosis, I lost no time in reading all of them. Twice.

However, there were a few things I had to find out the hard way.

My family will often make caramel popcorn to chow down on during a movie night. When I say it is one of the most addictive substances known to man… Anyway, the copious amounts of butter in the recipe precluded my daily allergic self from partaking. Determined to indulge in salty sweetness, I tried to replicate the recipe using coconut oil.

Instead of a smooth caramel, I ended up with a weird sugary mess with an oil slick an inch deep.

Cue the tears, and cue the therapy session from mom in which we try to convince me that the sun would indeed come out tomorrow.

I ended up trying again with a vegan butter which worked like a charm!

My other favorite story is the time when someone contacted me through Facebook and asked me to make them some sugar free, gluten free, vegan muffins. I gave it my best shot, but ended up with sugar free, gluten free, vegan paperweights. Out of time and ingredients, I handed them over to the client. Not ten minutes after she left, the client called me and asked me why the muffins were so dense.

And they wonder why I jumped at the chance of OIT…