Welcome! I’m Bethany and while I have always loved baking, I re-learned how to bake in order to avoid many top allergens in 2018. I had no clue at that time that I’d be starting my own allergy friendly baking business in 2023!
Rewinding a bit, I grew up in Kingston ON, Barrie ON, and Ladner BC. I was trained as a math teacher at the University of Waterloo and Queen’s University and I taught highschool math for two years in Egypt and middle school math for 2.5 of the 4 years we lived in Sweden. The other 1.5 years in Sweden is where my allergy friendly baking journey began. My son was born in Sweden and started developing allergies right after he was born. We slowly figured out what foods were safe for him over his first year of life, just in time for his first birthday!
This meant I needed a cake for my son’s first birthday with no dairy, egg, wheat/ rye/ barley/ gluten, sesame, peanuts, tree nuts, oats, soy, and more. I know some people dealing with lots of food allergies just skip the first birthday cake entirely to avoid the stress (and because the baby won’t really know any different anyways!), but part of my own pre-baby identity was baking, so there was something in me that just NEEDED to make my precious little baby his first birthday cake! I could NOT miss this milestone, for him or for myself.
Thanks to many tips and recipes shared in one of the allergy parent facebook groups I had joined, I found a recipe to try and it turned out pretty well! Thankfully, my first cake was much better than my first pizza crust attempt later on in 2019 that was so inedible I was scared to try pizza crust again until 2021!!
I’m thankful that my first cake making experience was much much better than that – I ended up doing a chocolate cake with mint buttercream icing, fondant roughly modeled into construction theme toppers, and I made rolled chocolate cookies to crumble into dirt. We lived in Sweden at the time, so I just grabbed a basic decorating tip set from IKEA and off I went with a star tip and a butter knife as my tools!
I’ve learned so much since then and I can’t wait to see how much more I’ll learn about allergy friendly baking as I continue down this path.
Bring on the cake! (And in the mean time, here’s a little walk down memory lane…)
Hmmm….not too sure about this whole thing…
Might as well try it out…
Oh wow, this is actually kind of great!
(p.s. did anyone notice that the cupcake and the cake photos were taken at two different meals with a haircut in between?!)