Allergies Suck!

"Allergies Suck, Mom."
This is a term a hear often from my five year old daughter.  "Suck" is not a word I usually let my kids use, but for some reason when she says it in that particular sentence I can't bring myself to say anything about it.  What am I supposed to say?  I try really hard to never invalidate her feelings by telling her that her allergies aren't a big deal.  They are.  But, I have learned that often times, I can prevent this feeling by simply being prepared for situations, such as birthday parties, family dinners, and even Sunday School classes.  After four years of practice these things are fairly easy to prepare for and we rarely have times where we are caught without food or that Elliana feels left out because her food is not as good.  Christmas, however, is a whole other story!
     Christmas is the time of year where people have food everywhere you go and around every corner someone is giving out chocolates, candies and cookies to all the cute little kids.  I used to LOVE this part of Christmas!  Now, this part of Christmas is just sad to me.  It doesn't scare me as much as it used to.  I am very vigilant about keeping an eye on what is being offered to Elli and likewise she is also becoming her own advocate and is amazingly good at asking about the ingredients of what is being offered and unfortunately, in most cases, politely turning it down.  It really doesn't seem to bother her very much anymore, but from a mother's perspective this scene is absolutely heartbreaking!  Christmas without nuts, eggs, and dairy often feels like an oxymoron to me.  They seem to be two things that cannot possibly exist in any sort of harmony.  How could you have Christmas without, Pecan Pie, Peanut Brittle, and all the "oh, so good" cookies that all require eggs and milk?  This could become a very depressing train of thought if one were to dwell on it.  Thankfully this year I finally feel like we overcame most of our typical Christmas obstacles thanks to  a lot of time and effort and the Divvies Bakery Cookbook!
     Lori Sandler and Divvies bakery is what first inspired me to start baking for Elli.  Oh, I was baking before, but it was under a totally different mindset.  I used to bake having essentially already given up.  I already knew that the food would not be as good as it's non-allergy friendly counterpart.  As a result, I didn't try very hard.  I got by, but nobody was lined up to try my concoctions.  Elli seemed to enjoy them overall, but she didn't feel like she was eating the same thing and, I think due to my attitude, she knew it was a sad imitation of the original.  Then, one day, I saw Lori Sandler and her son, Benjamin, on Martha Stewart and to my surprise they were making nut, dairy and egg free chocolate cupcakes and they looked delicious!  I felt a small twinge of hope and excitement and so, thanks to the recipe which they so kindly gave out on the show, I made my first batch of Divvies Chocolate Cupcakes!  They were delicious!  So delicious that I had to admit that I really could not tell them apart from a normal cupcake and, if anything, they were actually one of the better chocolate cupcakes I had eaten.  This experience really inspired me.  If it was possible with cupcakes, surly it was possible with other things right?  And so I began to really try and figure out how to make something that were nut, dairy and egg-free AND actually taste good.  What's even better is that Divvies released a bakery cookbook this year and that only served to inspire me more!
    So, bringing this back around to the idea of having Christmas and good food without all the allergens I started to think about what I could do to give Elli those traditional Christmas experiences....safely.  So, what screams Christmas to me more than anything else?  GINGERBREAD HOUSES!  That was my first Christmas goal of the year.  I already knew I could make the pieces thanks to a graham cracker cookie recipe that I have been using for a couple of years now, but royal icing without eggs?  I was more than a little concerned.  Royal icing is a very think and sticky icing that dries firm which is why it is used for gingerbread houses.  It also contains eggs and when you are not baking them eggs are very hard to replace!  I did manage to do it though!  It was not easy, but once I figured out a good combination of ingredients I actually made a frosting concoction that was so sticky there was no doubt in my mind that it would work.  Now, to be fair to traditional royal icing, my egg-free, dairy-free version would never work well on a cake.  It did not dry quite as hard and it was not very easy to pipe.  For gingerbread houses though, it worked like a dream!  For those of you who are curious the recipe is as follows (more or less)

cream of tarter
lemon juice
glycerine
vanilla
powdered sugar
soy milk and/or water

This bowl of very sticky frosting was the final product:

Are you seeing a problem with this "recipe?  As you may have noticed there are no measurements.  That's because I didn't measure.  I just added them all together until it go really sticky.  It was an experiment, what else can I say?

Now, as I said before, the graham cracker cookie part was easy.  Here is a link to the graham cracker cookie recipe I use.

Take note, that I obviously burned a couple of these but as I was not planning on actually eating them we used them on our gingerbread anyway.
    
Now came the moment of truth, would my egg-free royal icing actually work?

Thankfully my icing did work, which is a good thing since the kids were getting more than a little impatient to decorate.  Here are a few pictures of the rest of our gingerbread house making and decorating experience:

We all had a wonderful time making our family gingerbread house and it was so wonderful to see Elli having a "typical" Christmas experience.  This will definitely become a Christmas tradition for us.  Since this project we have made candy, banana bread and today we will be trying Lori Sandler's sugar cookie cut-out recipe, which we are very excited about!

I have been so blessed this year to have had the opportunity and resources to finally be able to do some new things to help my daughter feel included, food wise, in the Christmas celebrations.   She is such a wonderful girl and almost always has a very good attitude about having different food, but it is such a blessing to see her face when she realizes that we all get to eat a piece of banana bread together.