There are very few allergen-free cookbooks, and The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook is the only allergen free baking book I know about.  The author of this cookbook is Cybele Pascal, the mother of two food allergic sons.  Because of the many food allergies in her family she set out to exclude all of the 7 major allergens (dairy, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish) from her cookbook, which is obviously very tough to accomplish when you are baking.

When I flipped through this book at the bookstore I was impressed by both the number of recipes and the beautiful pictures.  The food in the photos actually looks like the real thing, I hoped the taste could measure up.  The recipes in this cookbook all use a flour blend which is a combination of superfine brown rice flour, tapioca starch, and potato starch.   The superfine brown rice flour is pretty pricey, I think the bag I bought was about $12 for a 3 lb bag.  At first I thought baking things out of this book would be prohibitively expensive, but I have made 4 of the recipes now and still have flour leftover.

The first recipe we made were the chocolate chip cookies.  I’ve made two other gluten free vegan chocolate chip cookie recipes and this beat both hands down.  I thought brown rice flour would be gritty but because of the superfine consistency of this flour it was not much more so than normal flour.  We then let my two year old pick out the next cookies to try and he wanted to try the chocolate sandwich cookies, which look like Oreo knockoffs.  This recipe was slightly more complicated since it required baking the cookie part and letting them cool and then making the frosting as well.  I was even more impressed with these.  They actually taste fairly similar to Oreo cookies, the chocolate cookie is crunchy and the creamy frosting is not too far off from the frosting in real Oreos.

The last recipe we tried really blew my socks off.  We had the baking powder biscuits, and I thought that there was really no way they were going to be as good as the previous two recipes.   They smelled like real biscuits coming out of the oven, and we served them warm with our meal.  My husband and I nearly forgot they were allergy free.  They taste just like homestyle biscuits you’d use for biscuits and gravy.  I have no idea how Cybele Pascal was able to recreate this taste but I’m pretty sure at that point we declared that she was a genius!

I definitely have no patience for baking experiments and when I’ve tried things and failed I get very frustrated.  That is why I am so thankful for people like Cybele Pascal who have spent the time and energy and who have the know how to create recipes like this for food allergic families.  My son didn’t even know what biscuits were until we made them that night.  We have a long list of other recipes we want to try from her cookbook, and also have plans to try some of the recipes from cybelepascal.com (including allergy free donuts!).

My mom has been on the look out for cookbooks for our family, that meet both Jake’s requirements of being allergy free, and my requirement of being gluten free.  I can’t remember where she heard of this little book, but it is written by Jennifer Katzinger who has a bakery in Seattle called Flying Apron bakery.  The cookbook is both gluten-free and vegan, so uses no milk or eggs, and in their place, she uses a lot of sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and yams.  I’ve seen some book reviews mention that some vegans do not consider honey vegan, and honey is used throughout this book, but you could substitute agave nectar for honey if that is a concern.

I really had trouble deciding which of these delicious looking recipes I should start with and the Blueberry Cinnamon Scones recipe ended up winning.  Jeremy and I had gotten in the bad habit of going to Starbucks on Saturday mornings to get coffee cake and coffees before I found out I needed to eat gluten free.  These little trips have been one of our few luxuries over the past year and I was really missing my morning cinnamon treats, so this recipe sounded like a great place to start.  I had never thought of putting blueberry and cinnamon together before, but in the description of the recipe, the author writes that cinnamon and blueberries “should be together as often as possible”.  Boy was she right!  These are delicious.  I’ve made them several times now, and they make 8 scones for the recipe.  Because this is really too many scones for us to eat, I experimented with freezing the dough and now we can make 2 or 3 scones for us and freeze the rest of the batch.  When my in-laws were in town a few weeks ago I made the dough ahead of time and then on Saturday morning just popped the dough in the oven and 25 min later or so, fresh baked scones!

Well we’ve tried a couple of other recipes out of the book now as well and they are all great.  We still have beets in our fridge from the winter CSA and I talked Jeremy into letting me make the Borscht for supper, which was a bit of a hard sell.  Borscht is a Russian beet stew, this one had beets, carrots, cabbage and sweet potatoes, and lots of dill.  She used a cashew cream in place of sour cream, which we thought was surprisingly good.  This is now one of my favorite ways to use beets, and something I had not thought of before and Jeremy actually ended up liking it pretty well.

The third recipe we’ve tried is a Moroccan Bean Salad over Baby Spinach with butternut squash.  We did not have a butternut squash but did have a giant crazy looking blue hubbard squash that we’ve been needing to use.

Jeremy has been calling this squash a “spider squash” and saying that when I cut into it he thought a bunch of little spiders were going to run out because it was so creepy looking.  It is a big squash, probably at least 5 pounds and about the size of 2 butternut squash, and just for the record, when I cut into it, no spiders ran out.  The blue hubbard squash tasted just like a normal winter squash despite it’s strange look.

Back to the recipe, the moroccan bean salad also turned out really well, the white beans and squash were very filling and the spices including cinnamon, turmeric and ginger were different than i was used to but very good.  She calls for it over a bed of spinach, but I actually cooked the spinach and mixed it up with the beans.  I’m not a huge fan of raw spinach, but cooked in the salad it was great.

I would highly recommend this cookbook to anyone wanting to cook vegan and/or gluten free, and especially if you need to cook both (for those just needing to cook vegan, be warned that you will have to purchase some specialty ingredients because of the recipes being gluten free).  This is a great cookbook for our family because it is so hard for me to find recipes that are both gluten free and vegan, and when we do find them, they aren’t always great…. but I can’t wait to try more recipes from this cookbook!  And… if I’m ever in Seattle I am definitely going to the Flying Apron Bakery.