The day is almost here, the day of my very first book signing. Two years ago, when I first decided I was going to create a healthy dessert cookbook without refined sugars, I had no idea the journey it would take me on. My goal at the time was pretty simple: create a couple dozen healthy and delicious dessert alternatives for my friends, family and clients and put it into a cute cookbook… Easy enough, right?
In the industry of healthy and fitness, there is a lot of time and energy put into the next big fad and way too much time spent telling everyone what they can’t have and very little on what you can have. After taking the time to learn and understand what highly processed foods and sugars do to the body, I began some R&D into the healthiest desserts I knew of at the time — vegan desserts. Unfortunately, I found that many of these desserts were using highly processed ingredients. I then turned to raw desserts and, although the basic concept was amazing — simple, no baking required, all whole ingredients — they still weren’t actually healthy. Most of recipes I found were loaded with so much refined sugar (the kind that makes your blood sugar go sky high) that it completely cancelled out the benefits of the whole foods they were being paired with! Lucky for me, I came across a few bloggers, chefs and cooks who showed me how to use whole ingredients in a new way! People like: Susan Powers of rawmazing.com, Angela Liddon of ohsheglows.com, Megan Gilmore of detoxinista.com, Heather Pace of sweetlyraw.com, Laura-Jane The Rawtarian at therawtarian.com and Ella Leché of pureella.com. Now all of these beautiful ladies don’t necessarily just make desserts or exclusively use unrefined ingredients. But, thanks to them, I was truly inspired to start using natural sugars in completely new ways. After learning that skill, the recipe crafting process came quite easily, after all, I did grow up in a kitchen with a mom making homemade desserts on the daily! Months of playing in the kitchen and 46 recipes later, I now have what is the very first raw, vegan family & kid-friendly dessert cookbook made with no refined sugars or processed ingredients – Sweets In The Raw: Naturally Healthy Desserts!
