About

Hi, and welcome to Lightning Bug Bakery.

I am a stream ecologist/project manager by day, and by any other spare moment, I am a baker. I especially love to try new recipes, tweak old favorites, and I almost always seem to have something on hand. I especially love to bake for others, making pies, cakes, pastries, cookies, or anything else to share with friends and family.

Update (November 5, 2017)

I am going to try to update the blog more frequently, focusing on foods that are safe for my daughter, who has several food allergies. Her allergies include dairy, egg, peanut, and sesame. Although these can be limiting, they can also open up opportunities to try new recipes, ingredients, and methods – expanding my baking horizons.

In general, I probably won’t need to do much about the peanut and sesame with my baking, although everything will be free of those ingredients. Because we do not have wheat or gluten allergies, I will continue to bake with regular flours. I may occasionally use tree nuts, but it will often be the case that they can be left out or an alternative could be used (for example in the case of almond milk – soy or rice milk could be used). Some common egg replacements include “flax eggs” and aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chick peas.

There are certainly a lot of allergy-safe recipes out there, I just hope to contribute to the community.