A Homemade Gluten Free Birthday ‘Cake’

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I remember celebrating my first birthday after learning of my severe gluten intolerance. It was less than two months after going gluten free and it was still very new for me and my family. My parents actually bought a regular gluten-laden birthday cake for the occasion and I was responsible for buying my own slice of gluten free chocolate cake. Somehow it’s just not quite the same having everyone else slice and eat a nice looking birthday cake, while I’m stuck scraping the icing off of my plastic container — especially on MY birthday.

I’m happy to say that a TON has changed since that birthday. My family is super supportive of me and always ensures that family gatherings have gluten free food to keep me safe. And in their defence, five years ago there weren’t near as many options for gluten free baked goods as there are now.

My birthday cakes have definitely progressed for the better. Going from stale, dry individual slices of gluten free cake bought from the grocery store, to everyone eating slices of Raw Aura‘s amazing raw banana chocolate cake, to this year when I actually made my own ‘cake’! I can’t tell you how proud I am that I made my own gluten free birthday ‘cake’ for everyone in my family to eat together. That’s how a birthday’s supposed to be. I say ‘cake’ loosely since it wasn’t so much of a traditional cake than a Peanut Butter Banana Cream Pie!! Oh my. What better way to celebrate a summer birthday than a cold cream pie? I love the banana – peanut butter – chocolate combo, so this was a real winner. My family loved it and fought over the leftovers. That’s how good it is. Nobody even batted an eye about it being gluten free.

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A Deck and a BBQ

The selling feature of the new place Ryan and I are renting is the huge rooftop deck!  It’s incredible.  We both missed outdoor space so much at our old place and we craved to be able to eat and hangout outside again.   A balcony was on our must have list to move, we just never imagined this big of a deck.  Now we’re always out there.  I love weekends where we eat all three meals out on our deck.  We’ve also hosted a few dinner parties out there – all BBQs of course!  It’s so enjoyable and I love being able to eat great food and drink sangria while socializing with friends and family.  That’s what life is all about right!

We got a fantastic new BBQ and boy do we try to use every excuse possible to grill every night!!  After a few weeks we started realizing that we needed some new meat options, our rotation was too small.  Now we are open to exploring new meats, cuts and recipes and we’ve found some delicious new things to cook.

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