Flourless Finesse

Learning to bake without flour is Jenna Barnard's bread and butter-even if she can't have bread or butter.

- MANDY NAGLICH

JENNA BARNARD'S BAKING journey started with a binder.

“My mom had a cabinet full of Taste of Home magazines,” she says. “She would clip out special recipes and put them all in this massive binder."

Jenna's not exactly sure when she started turning to baking as her creative outlet, but she remembers paging through that binder to find inspiration and recipes for brownies, pies, and cookies.

"Anything that can be ooey-gooey and rich is pretty much my bread and butter—well,” she laughs, “even though I can't have bread or butter.”

Less than a year after starting to chronicle her creations on Butternut Bakery, a blog named after the street she grew up on, Jenna found out she had sensitivities to both gluten and dairy. In order to live a life without feeling sluggish or uncomfortable, she needed to cut both things out of her diet.

As a Midwesterner raised on cheesy noodle casseroles and rustic tortellini soup (another favorite Taste of Home recipe tucked in her mother's binder), Jenna never expected such a diagnosis. However, she was determined to keep her blog and her passion for baking going, even without essential ingredients like flour, milk, and butter.

“When I was figuring out my health issues, I went vegan for a whole year,” she says. “Who knew you could replace eggs with ground-up flaxseed and water?!”