How The Sweet Camellia Box Came to Be
About 7 years ago, I was feeling dizzy, fatigued, and had ear and head pain that was excruciating. I thought maybe it was the aftermath of trauma from my recent father's death. I tried to explain it to doctors, but no one had answers. And so, the pain was begrudgingly tolerated.
My husband saw this awful pain daily and finally convinced me to see a preventative integrative doctor. From this moment on, I have not gone back to my old ways of eating. I found out I had gut toxicity and pre-diabetes among other minor irregularities in my blood work. My doctor gave me a sensitivity test and I discovered a wide range of food sensitivities, a few being gluten and eggs. He also told me that if I don't change my diet, I WILL have diabetes.
So, I went home and cried knowing I couldn't eat what I had come to enjoy eating everyday of my life. I would go to the store and look and look for ingredients on packages of something I could eat, and that satisfied my sweet tooth; or for that matter something that just tasted good. There are many products out there without gluten, I will attest to that, but they always contained additional prohibited ingredients for my diet. So, I began to substitute gluten-free flour in recipes that called for regular flour and found that eggs can be replaced with flax and water. They were flat, flavorless and even on a bad day, I wouldn't eat them or offer them to a family member.
So, I began to explore recipes and then, ultimately create recipes that omitted these toxic ingredients to my body: flour, eggs and refined sugar. One day, I made a cashew butter chocolate chip cookie. My family couldn't believe that they not only could have one, but two, and they were actually putting something sweet and delicious in their tummy without spiking blood sugar or gut inflammation. My children were skeptical, but they now know health benefits of too much sugar and gluten in your diet.
The Sweet Camellia Box pastries have definitely evolved from cookies that tasted like cardboard to awesome treats that will amaze your taste buds. Believe it or not, you will want to come back for more.