New Wheat-Free Cookie Flavor
In yesterday’s blog you saw us testing them; the tests were perfect, so today they’re available to order! Introducing the latest addition to our wheat-free cookie collection: (Wheat-Free) Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies. 
Find more of our awesome wheat-free cookie and brownie flavors under the Artisan Bakery heading of our website. Happy Munching!
August’s Flavors: More Wheat-Free Options
August will be here next week, and it’s bringing with it some new and exciting wheat-free options to our brownie and cookie line-up. 
Sugar dusted (Wheat-Free) Cinnamon Snickerdoodle Cookies, and gorgeous (Wheat-Free) Toasted Coconut Brownies are sure to be the highlights of your summer. They’re not, however, our only wheat-free flavors. (Wheat-Free) Peanut Butter and (Wheat-Free) Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies also make our favorites list, as well as (Wheat-Free) Mocha and (Wheat-Free) Half Original/Half Pecan Brownies.
Interested in trying all of these flavors and more? Our Cookie and Brownie Samplers make great treats for the entire family and excellent corporate food gifts for environmentally-friendly and health-conscious businesses. For more compassionate corporate food gift ideas, check out our Gift Baskets and Gift Sets.
Our Oat Flour Transformation
It’s so exciting to be finally transitioning many of our products to organic oat flour! We’re now in the process of testing next month’s wheat-free organic brownie and cookie flavors, and, because all of our new wheat-free products are turning out so w
ell, we’ve decided to go ahead and slowly transition our entire selection of organic brownies and cookies to organic oat flour. So, as we re-formulate one more brownie and cookie flavor to be wheat-free each month, you can expect to see our selection of delectable wheat-free flavors grow and grow. We’re already offering several wheat-free options including (Wheat-Free) Mocha Brownies, (Wheat-Free) Peanut Butter Cookies, and (Wheat-Free) Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies. Give ‘em a try, you won’t even miss the gluten!
(Wheat-Free) Chocolate Chip Pecan: Our Next Cookie Flavor
We’re super excited about our new (Wheat-Free) Peanut Butter Cookies! They’ll be the cookie of the month flavor coming up in July, and they’re fantastically wheat-free! In fact, we think they’re so great that we’ve already started perfecting our next flavor of wheat-free gourmet cookies: 
Chocolate Chip Pecan. These nutty cookies are one of our most popular gourmet cookie flavors, and we’re excited to have them re-created wheat-free. Even though they’re not the flavor of the month until October, Chocolate Chip Pecan is one of those flavors that’s so delicious we like to keep them available all year round. Keep your eyes out for a new “Wheat-Free Cookies” page coming to our website soon!
As our selection of Wheat-Free cookie and brownie options grows, we may start offering a Wheat-Free Sampler like the Baker’s Choice Samplers we offer now. Would you be interested in a Sampler containing all Wheat-Free cookies and brownies?
What Mothering Means to Me
My journey to Motherhood has been by far the most enriching, stretching, humbling experience thus far. I often joke that I was the “Perfect Mother” before my daughter was born because I knew it all. Now that I have unwittingly invited my guru to live with me 24/7, I realize how little I do know and it’s so much easier to let go of judgments I once had. Each child is different and requires subtly different types of parenting. Before I had my daughter, I thought all children needed exactly the same thing. Yes, there are similar basic needs, but there is no simple formula to perfect mothering. Oh how well Olivia has taught me that!
For me, Mothering is a Spiritual endeavor like no other. I continuously have to set aside my own needs to tend to the needs of Olivia. The important part is remembering to return to my needs and tend to them. This is where my self-healing practices come in.
- I begin my day by nourishing my body with vibrant, vegan, organic, whole foods, and fresh veggie juices. When I have the nourishment I need, all things come more easily.
- Although I have fought it at times throughout my life, I am mindful of my need for regular exercise. I studied yoga for many years and throughout my pregnancy, yet Mothering has taught me that I need a more vigorous outlet. Now that I’ve found Nia, I get the release I need and it’s much more fun to literally ‘Dance through Life’ and get my exercise at the same time.
- Before I became vegan in 1997, there were extra 10-15 pounds that didn’t seem to want to leave my body, so I used to put forth a lot of effort to find fat-free treats. Through self-inquiry and exploration, I discovered that eating consciously is a necessity. One of the ways I do this is to remove distractions and focus while I’m eating, especially goodies. Additionally, choosing only the highest quality sweets allows me to be more deeply satisfied with less quantity, so even though it may be more expensive and higher in fat, I am ultimately saving money and calories by choosing premium foods. Now that we are transitioning our brownies to be wheat-free, Tessa (my assistant extraordinaire!) jokes that it’s “Brownie o’clock.”
- Doing work I am passionate about inspires me to strive toward my greatness. Sharing that joy is one of the best parts of my life and knowing that I’m doing so without harming other beings makes it even better. This is a wonderful side-effect of being vegan.
- Living in a rural area and being surrounded by Nature feeds my soul. Whenever I need a moment to regroup or get grounded, I need only look out my window or step out my door to be renewed.
- Nurturing friendships with a few close people helps me to know that even when I feel like an insane mother, I’m actually doing ok.
Embracing my role as a Mother has been a most awesome process and certainly the biggest endeavor I have ever embarked on. To temper my feelings of overwhelm at the vastness of it all, I try to remember that at the base of parenting, one of the primary gifts I can share with my daughter is how to accept and cope when things don’t go her way in the world. If she has that tool, she’ll be far better off than most adults I know! 
Here’s to Mothering and the fullness of it all. How lucky we are to have the choice to live our lives consciously, compassionately, and with deep love toward our little ones and all beings.
Summer Flavors on the Way
I know summer doesn’t officially start until next month, but we’re celebrating early with Coconut Key Lime as our cookie of the month flavor for May.
These delightful bites of paradise, along with everyone’s favorite Double Chocolate Brownies (now made wheat-free), and pucker-licious Sour Cherry Chocolate Fudge are being shipped today to all our lovely monthly club members. So, take your brownie, fudge or cookie of the month treats and go have a picnic, ’cause summer time is on the way!
Double Chocolate Brownies Now Wheat-Free!
The latest news from Allison’s Gourmet’s vegan bakery is that next month’s Double Chocolate Brownies will be our second wheat-free brownie flavor! This is exciting news, as it offers people with wheat sensitivities more brownie options to enjoy. 
But they’re not just for people who eat wheat-free. I’m a firm believer in a balanced diet, and even if you don’t react to wheat or gluten, they are so ubiquitous in our food culture that it seems a good idea for everyone to take a break from eating glutinous grains now and then. Expand your horizons, give your body something new and interesting to chew on: wheat-free brownies made with oat flour!
As for the rest of our products, most of them do not have gluten as an intended ingredient. However, because we currently use wheat flour for our gourmet cookies and all the other brownie flavors in our vegan bakery, none of our products can be guaranteed gluten-free. We would love to eventually have all of our products made without gluten, so keep your ears open, and please give us your comments and questions!
P.S. Tomorrow is the last day to enter our Mother’s Day Contest, one lucky mom will get free sweets!
Announcing: Our New Wheat-Free Brownies Now Available!
We did it! Today we shipped the first order of our new Half Original/Half Pecan Wheat-Free Brownies! It’s a big day for us because this is something that I’ve been dreaming about and working towards for a long time. As a fan of Allison’s Gourmet, you probably know that I insist that all our gourmet vegan goodies taste at least as good, if not better, than their non-vegan counterparts. So it may go without saying that we’d only offer gluten-free baked goods if they, too, met my high standards for quality and taste.
For years, I have played with a variety of gluten-free flours, but none ever measured up to my requirements. Then, about a month ago, we started playing in the test kitchen, substituting organic oat flour for the organic whole-wheat pastry flour we had been using. And Eureka! Just last week, we got the perfect results I’d been hoping for. Trust me, our new wheat-free brownies are awesome and no one would ever guess they were missing a thing!
Now you may notice that I’m saying “wheat-free” instead of “gluten-free.” That’s because, while oats themselves do not contain gluten, they are often processed with glutinous grains like wheat, and therefore have the possibility of containing traces of gluten. We are working to find a supplier of oat flour that is both gluten-free and organic. In the meantime, we’re using organic oat flour (which may contain traces of gluten) in our Half Original/Half Pecan Brownies. So, depending upon sensitivity level, those who are reactive to wheat, may, at long last, be able to enjoy our brownies! Stay tuned for more wheat-free flavors coming soon.
We’d like to know: Are you as excited about wheat-free baked goods as we are?!
Coming Soon: Wheat-Free Brownies
For the past couple of months we’ve been working in Allison’s test kitchen to perfect wheat-free baked goods. Our dream would be to eventually transition all of our vegan brownies and cookies to wheat-free versions. 
However, before we undergo the long process of reformulating each one of our recipes, we want to make sure that wheat-free vegan baked goods are important to you.
Question: Assuming there is no taste difference between our whole wheat and wheat-free vegan brownies, would you be more inclined to buy the wheat-free ones? Answer or post your own question here on our blog, for a chance to win a sample and give us your taste-test opinion of our new wheat-free brownies as soon as they become available.
