EggNots: Fun for Easter with Egg Allergies + GIVEAWAY

Thanks to EggNots for sponsoring this post. Make sure to enter the GIVEAWAY at the bottom of this post!

If you celebrate Easter, you know that dyeing eggs is a rite of passage for every kid.  

But what if you have an egg allergy?

Since Little Guy has food allergies to eggs, dairy, sesame, tree nuts and peanuts, we've put a few holiday traditions to the side. But dyeing eggs is still a tradition we can celebrate because of EggNots!

In past years, I bought look-alike eggs at local craft stores that were made of materials like cardboard. However, they were very light and didn't feel at all like real eggs.

This is the first year we've tried EggNots, and I was amazed how much they looked and felt like real eggs. From the egg carton to the weight of the eggs (about as heavy as real eggs), they are just like the real thing!

The secret? EggNots are a dyeable ceramic product. The ceramic material makes them look and feel so realistic.

Little Gal even tried to crack one!



Now, this brings up another point. Just be sure to communicate to your child with an egg allergy that these are NOT real eggs. 

Children with an egg allergy need to know that they are safe for them to touch and use. It's something I was sure to stress to Little Guy before he even touched them because they can easily be mistaken for real eggs. 

Okay, onto the fun.

Just take a look at this crazy table! We didn't have newspaper, so we lined our table with old catalogs and flyers. 

I gave the kiddos a few options for decorating including natural dyes like Color Garden and India Tree. But you know what they loved best?  Using a small paint brush to cover the eggs with glitter paint!

Aren't they just vibrant and beautiful?

There are so many ways you can decorate Easter eggs. From natural dyes to paint, or markers and stickers. 

However you do it, it's all about spending time together as family, laughing, talking and sharing in special moments - food allergies or not.

Leave a comment about why you'd like to use EggNots this Easter and be entered to win one 12-pack of EggNots. Two winners will be randomly chosen by 9am on Friday, March 11! U.S. entries only please.

You may also like:

Easter Bunny Hayride

Easy Easter CupCakes

Gluten, Dairy and Egg Free Strawberry Vanilla Cake

Allergy Friendly Easter Celebration

SuperEaster

 

SunButter Chocolate Heart Cookies for Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is just around the corner! I thought I'd pass along a few fun and food allergy friendly Valentine's ideas that have worked well for our family for past Valentine's Day celebrations! And you know that means they're dairy free, egg free, nut free and sesame free!

First, make sure to check out my new guest post on the SunButter blog today for SunButter Chocolate Heart Cookies. They're an extremely easy Valentine's Day treat AND one of the BEST vegan and nut free cookies I've tasted in a long time. 

I've baked this recipe 3 times now (for multiple school events!) and they turned out perfectly each time.

Make sure to also pin this recipe on Pinterest for future use!!

I also just love these easy heart shaped pancakes - vegan pancakes for us.

And this delicious Chocolate Cocoa Popcorn - an allergy friendly treat!

And don't forget about heart shaped chocolate dipped Rice Krispie treats like this!

So many tasty foods can be made into heart shapes. All you really need are a few good cookie cutters or heart shaped pans. Here are a few items I've collected over the years to make our Valentine's Day celebrations fun! (affiliate links)

How are you celebrating this Valentine's Day?

Easy Easter Cupcake or Muffin Decorations

I don't know about you, but sometimes I find candy-focused holidays frustrating. I see the aisles of pink, purple and yellow colored bags full of Easter candy, knowing most of them aren't safe for Little Guy. On one hand, it's certainly better for our health (and teeth!) not to have access to all that candy. But sometimes it's a little discouraging too.

So, how do we move past those feelings and still have our own fun?

First, by remembering the true purpose of Easter. Second, having Easter fun that's not food focused. And finally, by focusing on what we CAN have of course. And there IS so much allergy-friendly candy and sweets Little Guy can have!

I just wanted to show you all the fun we've had with food allergy-friendly candy and sweet stuff.  It's so easy to find ideas. I mean, just type in "Easter cupcakes" on Pinterest, and you'll find SO many cute decorations. 

But as working mama with little free time to spare, I decided to keep it simple.  

We topped sweet muffins with melted marshmallows, sprinkles and jelly bean flowers...

Jelly bean flower decoration - made with Surf Sweets Jelly Beans

We made bunny rabbits with:

• Dandies Vegan Marshmallow and Pink India Tree Sprinkles ears
• Enjoy Life Chocolate Chipseyes
• Surf Sweets Jelly Beansnose
• Let's Do Organic Shredded Coconut white fur

Just cut a marshmallow in half diagonally and you get two perfect bunny ears!

And we topped this bunny with SunButter as a sort of "frosting" on a sweet muffin. Plus Let's Do Organic Shredded Coconut. I'd like to try this again with fruit for the bunny instead of the candy. It would make  perfect Easter breakfast treat!

And look at all of our favorite sweet treats. Food allergy-friendly, colorful and fun.

We used all of these tasty treats as decorations. Have you tried any of these? What's your favorite?  How do you celebrate an allergy-friendly Easter?

Pink India Tree Sprinkles

Surf Sweets Jelly Beans

Dandies Vegan Marshmallows

Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips

Let's Do Organic Shredded Coconut

 

You might also like these Easter posts and fun ideas!

Egg Free Easter and Bunny Hayride

SuperEaster

Easter and Birthday Celebration

Vanilla Cake with Strawberry Filling

SunButter Chocolate Cups

This post contains affiliate links which is of no cost to you! 

Easy Heart Shaped Pancakes for Valentine's Day

OH Valentine's Day. How I love (and DON'T love) thee! 

I try not to make too much fuss about "holidays" like Valentine's Day. There's enough pressure in day to day living! However, I DO want to have a little fun and make sure my kids do too.

So far, we bought good-old valentines for the kiddos to give out at their school. Simple, cheap, cute AND they include NON-FOOD "treats" like pencils and stickers. 

Valentine's Day is such a candy and treat-focused time which makes it challenging for kids with food allergies. Non-food treats are an awesome way to celebrate the day and still show friends you care. Aww.

Oh, and parents of kids with food allergies REALLY appreciate those non food treats too.

On the other hand, it's also fun to have food allergy-friendly recipes and ideas in your back pocket for days like this.  I have a set of heart shaped cookie cutters like these (affiliate) that I'll use on Valentine's day to have fun with sandwiches, fruit, cheese, etc, etc!). 

We're also going to have our favorite Vegan Pumpkin pancakes to start the day with a special treat. I already cooked and froze them ahead of time so I can just pull them out of the freezer on Vday. 

It's so easy to make this beautiful plate. Just cut a triangle out of the top of halved strawberries, and sprinkle shredded coconut and dairy-free chocolate chips and enjoy!

I used this tin foil mold idea to make heart shaped molds for the pancakes. It was simple and easy to make and it took about 5 minutes total!  

How do you do it?

• Basically, just fold a long piece of tinfoil the "hotdog" or long way, and wrap it around a heart shaped cookie cutter.  
• Take out the cookie cutter from the foil, and adjust the tinfoil as needed to make a more perfect heart.
• Spray the inside of the tinfoil with oil of your choice. I used olive oil in my Misto Sprayer (affiliate).
• Put the tinfoil heart mold on an already heated pan and pour in your pancake batter.
• Once the pancake is done on one side, carefully peel off the tinfoil and flip the pancake as usual to finish cooking.

This photo is about 2 pancakes later. The molds are still ready to shape a pancake!

Tips: 

• Don't plan on making 20 pancakes with this tinfoil mold unless you have lots of time. I successfully used each one for about 3 pancakes (and made the rest of my pancakes the traditional way!). 
• After each pancake I wiped off some of the pancake batter that stuck onto the tinfoil mold.
• Make sure to spray the inside of the mold every time before you use it so the batter doesn't stick. 

How do you celebrate Valentine's Day? There are SO many creative ideas out there (on Pinterest for instance!). 

What's your favorite?

!

Merry Christmas Fun with Last Minute Recipes

This holiday season has been busier than ever (and I know it has for you too!). Between caring for sick kids (daycare germs have attacked our family!), working full time and trying to prep for the holidays, my "to do" list is at max capacity!

But we've had fun in between everything.  And of course we're trying to appreciate and recognize the reason for the season.

What fun have we had?

Well, we went to a brunch with Santa a few weekends ago to start. Even though it was a buffet style brunch, the restaurant made a safe food allergy friendly meal especially for Little Guy. I felt like we were in Disney World as I've heard you receive the same type of amazing service there!

I also brought some safe muffins to complement this protein and fruit focused meal!

Little Guy enjoyed it!

Thankfully Grandma made Christmas cookies with the kiddos. Can you believe I haven't baked ONE SINGLE cookie this holiday season!?  Yikes!

I did take the time to make chocolate dipped...ummm...EVERYTHING this past weekend. We had some pretzels and chocolate to use up. So we just melted dairy free Enjoy Life Chocolate chips and dipped them in chocolate and sprinkles. We cut a banana and dipped it too.  Yum.

We have some after holiday parties to attend this season, so I'm hoping to make a few desserts and/or sides for those events. Lately I've been down to the wire and making everything the night before/day of the event.  So, if you're like me and looking for last-minute holiday recipe ideas, here are few oldies but goodies that you might like!

Egg Free Italian Meatballs

Healthy Three-Bean Salad

Cranberry Salad

Warm Roasted Veggies

Chocolate Pretzel Peppermint Bark

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Sunbutter Chocolate Cups: Taste Just Like Reese's

I've been wanting to make peanut free and dairy free Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for awhile now. I've had the candy molds sitting in the deep dark depths of my kitchen cabinets for about a year!  In preparation for Halloween festivities, I thought I'd try out a recipe for Sunbutter Chocolate Cups. Let me tell you, they are DIVINE. The Hubs and I both think they taste just like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

At FABlogCon (Food Allergy Bloggers Conference), SunCups said they are working on a dairy free version of their tasty nut free sunbutter filled chocolate cups. OH BOY! Until then, I'm excited that I can make these for Little Guy!

Also, one note if you're making these for kids with food allergies. Since these are "look-alike" candies, make sure you emphasize that these are DIFFERENT than Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Just to make sure kids with food allergies realize they have to be careful if they eat something that looks like this.

Thanks to Sunbutter for their amazing and easy recipe. I didn't have the exact ingredients in my kitchen, so I thought I'd share my version with you that worked out perfectly too.

I mean, just take a look at this mouthwatering treat.

It's so exciting making fun recipes for your family that are safe for EVERYONE to eat, you know?

So how do you make this sweet nut free and dairy free treat?

Slowly melt 1 cup of dairy and nut free chocolate chips in a double broiler. You can see I made my own using a glass bowl and small pan.

Can you say YUM?

Pour about 1/4 - 1/2 tsp of melted chocolate in the bottom of your candy mold (depending on the size). Make sure it covers the bottom of your mold.  Put the mold in the freezer for 5 minutes and freeze the chocolate.

While the chocolate is freezing, mix up the Sunbutter filling. You can see here that I tried it two ways.  One with vanilla extract and one without. The vanilla extract makes the Sunbutter filling a little more moist when you're working with it. As for taste and texture when eating it, I didn't notice a difference with or without it!

Roll the filling into small balls, about 1/2 tsp size, and press balls down slightly into frozen chocolate cups.

Cover with rest of melted chocolate. Next time I may try to make them a little flatter on top, but this way turned out great too!

Sunbutter Chocolate Cups
Adapted from Sunbutter's awesome recipe

Ingredients

Filling:

• 6 Tbsp smooth sunflower seed butter (try other types of "butters" if you can't eat sunflower!)
• 2 Tbsp powdered sugar/confectioner's sugar
• 4 tsp organic corn syrup (as Sunbutter recommends, you can also use agave syrup, brown rice syrup or cane syrup)
• 2 tsp vanilla extract (This makes the inside Sunbutter filling a little more moist when you're working with it. I tried one batch with it and one without. As for taste and texture when eating it, I didn't notice a difference with or without it!)

Outer Chocolate Coating:

• 1 cup chocolate chips (I used Enjoy Life which are free of the top 8 allergens. Pascha chocolate also now offers dairy free chocolate chips!)
• 1 Tbsp Sunbutter (This helps thicken the chocolate. Other recipes suggest palm shortening as an option too).

Directions

• Melt your chocolate in a double broiler (I used a glass bowl on top of a sauce pan) on low heat. Stir until chocolate is melted.
• Pour about 1/4 - 1/2 tsp of melted chocolate in the bottom of your candy mold (depending on the size). Make sure it covers the bottom of your mold.
• Put the mold in the freezer for 5 minutes and freeze the chocolate.
• While chocolate is freezing, mix up the Sunbutter filling. Roll the filling into small balls, about 1/2 tsp size, and press balls down slightly into frozen chocolate cups.
• Cover with rest of melted chocolate.
• Makes about 24 small Sunbutter Chocolate Cups

Recommendations

• I used small candy molds. It would be fun to try others themed candy molds like this Small Pumpkin Chocolate Candy Mold or Small Heart Shape Silicon Candy Mold too!
• Store these in the freezer. This chocolate is not tempered (it will melt at room temperature) and eat them soon after you get them out of the freezer!
• HIDE these in the freezer. If I didn't hide them, then I know we wouldn't have any left for Halloween! (yes, this is a direct reference to my Sunbutter Chocolate Cup loving Hubs <3)

Here are some of the basics you need to make this recipe!  Choose your favorite chocolate (I used a mix of Enjoy Life mini chips and dark chocolate chips).

This post includes affiliate links.