Food Allergies Are No Reason To Give Up Chocolate Cupcakes

Chocolate cupcakes are a joy to children and adults alike…but what if you were allergic.

If you asked a group of ten people what their favorite food is, how many do you suppose would answer, “Chocolate!”? Odds are, quite a few. Chocolate foods, like chocolate cupcakes, Swiss Miss cocoa, chocolate pudding, are a favored dessert item.

Unfortunately, there are some poor souls whose bodies won’t agree with their love of chocolate. They may have been told they are allergic to, or cannot tolerate chocolate. What are these people to do?

The good news is that realistically, not very many people are allergic to chocolate. Of those who do have an intolerance to chocolate products, the allergy or intolerance is not usually to the chocolate - the actual cocoa - itself. Most people who have allergic reactions when they eat chocolate are reacting to something else in the chocolate or the chocolate food.

The culprit could be an additive in the chocolate, or an ingredient used to produce the chocolate. Milk, corn syrup, lecithin, soy, nuts, and gluten, are all ingredients that can be found in chocolate and chocolate foods that are more likely to cause allergies than pure cocoa. So a person’s allergy may not be to the chocolate at all, but it could be to the flour used in the chocolate cupcake mix, or the milk in the chocolate chip cupcakes; the allergy could even be to an ingredient that wasn’t put in the chocolate cup cakes at all, The allergy could be to a trace amount of oil that got on the chocolate chips at the food processing plant that were put into the chocolate chips cup cakes.

Point made.. But this just goes to show how difficult living with a food allergy or intolerance is. Not only do food allergy sufferers have to learn what foods they can and cannot eat, but they also have to learn to be diligent in reading product labels and know what might affect them that is not listed.

People with food allergies do have safe options, though, and now they are better (tasting) than ever.

People with food allergies have options. They have new companies that produce safe foods. Companies that know their chocolate chips in cupcakes can’t have even a trace amount of a food contaminant.

The really neat thing is that these companies also have figured ways of producing foods that taste like traditional foods from other foods that are safe for allergy sufferers with unique needs. These companies have developed whole food product lines to feed the dessert starved safely. So now, allergy sufferers can choose from chocolate cream cheese cupcakes,
Chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting and chocolate molten cupcakes.

But if baking is what they really love, they can also buy alternatively produced cooking and baking ingredients to use their own favorite recipe for easy double chocolate cupcakes. It’s simple really. Allergens like milk are really only needed in recipes for moisture and texture. It’s easy to replace that with something less offending like pumpkin and have delicious chocolate pumpkin cupcakes instead. The even nicer part is that lots of these recipes lose the unhealthy fats in the dairy products, so not only are you left with delicious cupcakes, you are left with delicious fat free chocolate pumpkin cupcakes.

But enough babbling. The whole point is, people do not have to give up the foods that they love when they are diagnosed with food intolerance or a food allergy. There are food product manufacturers out there who understand the needs of people with food allergies, and are waiting for your patronage. So the only question left is…what’s for dessert?