Catherine Templeton has just landed in Taos, New Mexico with her dog Finneas. She has an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University and a culinary degree in Patisserie from the California School of Culinary Arts. You can look for her upcoming sweets and treats on her website SweetNoWheat.com.

About a year ago, my sister took a little detour from the traditional Western medical suggestions she’d been getting for her debilitating tummy aches. “Try this antibiotic,” and “this antacid,” and so on, and so forth. None of it was helping, and the stomach pains were getting worse. She was getting pale, she was getting more and more sick.  So finally, she went to a Chinese doctor who suggested she cut out gluten.  And it worked, tralala! As a pastry chef, I was rather confounded. No brioche for my baby girl? No more tarte tatin? No cupcakes for her birthday? Quel dommage! How would she love me? But she was my sister, and she seemed to persist in that silly admiration and adoration that we share, whatever trials and travails we endured. I made a few little stabs at gluten-free desserts, but they were sort of picked over and we cast them aside and we enjoyed a glass of wine and our lovely little commiserations on life and love in other, beautiful, ways, the ways that we do. We survived. She thrived.

Meanwhile, I was fighting my own battles with migraines. I was trying different medications that didn’t work, making lists of “triggers,” and becoming a recluse, trying to avoid light, sound, smells, and even “negative energy;” basically, anything that seemed to aggravate the escalating onslaught of pain. Nowhere online or anywhere else was there any suggestion of gluten-free diets working for migraines, but somewhere in my discussions with ma belle sister I got an inkling that she was onto something, that what she was doing just might work for me too. What did I have to lose, when every afternoon was spent in a blacked out bedroom with ice on my head and pain killers tearing up my stomach anyway?

I’d tried migraine diets, of course, which suggested cutting out all of my favorite foods: cheese, (brie, impossible!) nuts, oh dear, (a life without almonds, tragique!) and worst of all, chocolate (dark chocolate: at different stages in my life substitute for, supplement to, enhancer of love, sex, sensuality - absolutely essential to my existence as a woman.) Needless to say, “the migraine diet” didn’t work.

So, gluten-free. I stopped eating pasta in the middle of an Ohio winter with a foot of snow on the ground. I gave up my nine grain La Brea bread with a quarter inch butter (butter isn’t forbidden, of course, but the bread is, and the butter alone was pretty, but not that pretty, even to a pastry chef. Not enough to eat alone anyway, even if it was from a local dairy.) Soft, white gluten though, how I missed it, six hours after dark descended on blue-snowed-flat-winded-threshed corn fields. Gnocchi, cookies, cake, manicotti… I sought out spinach, and flax and as many kinds of lentils as Kroger and Meijer and Wal-mart could collectively offer. I bought broccoli and squash out of season. I filled my refrigerator with Naked juice. I did well. The skull I wanted pressure washed, sand blasted, replaced began to ease up. I felt lighter and brighter. The nights were just as long, but I slept through them.  And with sleep, unlike insomnia, comes dreams.

Oh yes, a beautiful man was giving me dark chocolate. Merci Mon Dieu! for surely I couldn’t have lived without it, but clearly, something was still missing from my gluten-free life, as rich in vegetal minerals as it may have been. It began with dreams of crackers. I didn’t want them exactly. But I dreamt I was eating them: sesame, poppy seed, cheddar – nothing I couldn’t, theoretically, manage gluten-free. Then it was animal crackers. A more immediate craving was creeping into those dreams, a bit more strangeness as well. One night, I sat straight up in bed. The animal cracker dream was back. In it, my friend Anne and I were playing with silver-colored fish in a bowl that had come from the Barnum and Bailey box. Her birthday was in a week! And my dear friend Jacky’s too! I was the pastry chef! I was the one that made them cupcakes! How in the world would I make my girls happy? How would I, in the midst of all of the celebrations, manage in my small little way to get in my teeny tiny bit of being adored? How would I play my role in making them celebrated? How would I decorate for them, if not with buttercream?

The butter from the special cows at Happy Badger glistened and gleamed in its wax paper in the refrigerator. Gluten-free? Oh yes, of course!  Half-way to buttercream? Oh, a gluten-free journey indeed! I could still pipe out little flowers of frosting!  But just like a quarter inch of pure butter on a slice of toasted air rather than on La Brea bakery bread, buttercream flowers wouldn’t be very appealing on a phantom cupcake. I had to make gluten-free cupcakes.

I looked up recipes for gluten-free cupcakes. Ground up chickpeas? Really? Teff? Quinoa? How could those taste good, at least in a sweet. And Crisco? I just couldn’t. I was trained in patisserie for goodness sake. Mon Dieu! Sacre Beurre!

I spent several hours doing research to discover that xantham gum was a binding agent, and that tapioca starch, while not the yummiest part of a gluten-free cupcake, could be pretty helpful in getting it to stand up, and would not turn a cupcake into bubble tea, though it isn’t used here. Brown rice flour, to me, tastes better than white rice flour, and isn’t as squeaky. Far better for most baking.

Several experiments and failures and recipe and website conflations – and even a few tears later— I had it. I loved being able to decorate again.

I’m far from scientific, so I couldn’t begin to explain the science behind gluten-free baking, or why a gluten-free diet has worked for my migraine headaches.  I just know that life has opened up for me in new ways, and that I am starting a bakery in Taos, New Mexico for celiacs and migraine sufferers with an aesthetic streak. If you’d like to track my progress in the next few months, I will soon update my website, SweetNoWheat.com.

I’m honored to be able to share my first successful cupcake recipe with you. Here it is! Enjoy!

Gluten-free Vanilla Cupcakes

7/8 cup organic granulated sugar

2 large free range, local eggs

1 1/4 cups brown rice flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp xanthan gum

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 scraped vanilla bean

1/2 cup whole milk

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Place cupcake baking liners in a 12-cupcake baking pan. Beat sugar, eggs and vanilla in the bowl of electric mixer at medium speed for about two minutes. Add flour, salt, baking powder, xanthan gum, oil, and milk ; beat at medium speed for one minute. Pour batter into cupcake cups. Place in oven and bake for about 25 minutes or until centre springs back when touched and cupcakes are very lightly browned. Let them cool completely before icing and decorate away.