Welcome!

I suppose I should start off with a little bit about myself! My name is Marie, I'm 22 years old and I live in Ipswich, Suffolk, UK with my husband, two gerbils, three mice and 20+ rats. I say 20+ because we run a rat rescue so numbers can vary between just our own pets at 20 and up to 40 all together when we're full! I could go on about rats all day but this is a baking blog!

I was diagnosed with a gluten intolerance just over three years ago in September 2009. At first it was a mine field- apart from the obvious bread, pasta, cakes etc I didn't realise that gluten was in so many things! Then I went through a phase where I found it all horribly restricting and got very frustrated at all the things I couldn't eat anymore. But recently I've realised that if you're a little creative and with more alternative products on the market, with a few tweaks and a little bit of imagination you can still enjoy the gorgeous things you did before (and some new things as well!).

So why did I decide to start this blog? I was really thrilled to receive The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book for Christmas; it was full of gorgeous looking cakes, cookies, cheesecakes and savoury muffins and I was salivating as I flicked through the pages. Best of all, my sister in law said she had made some of the recipes for her coeliac friend and they turned out well so it should be more than possible to create the fabulous looking goodies but friendly for my belly! I also know how hard it is to find good, reliable recipes online for dietary needs that don't have silly, hard to find ingredients or long complicated methods. The idea behind this blog is to share how I took the recipes in the Hummingbird book and made them tasty but gluten free. I'm going to share what brands I used, whether I had to make any tweaks to the recipes and, most importantly, whether they taste just as good as ordinary food!