Sweet new cookbook from baker Allison Lubert

A NUTRITIONIST as well as a food-allergy sufferer, Allison Lubert has had a big impact on "restrictive" eating around Broad and South for the past four years, since the first Sweet Freedom Bakery opened there, with delicacies free of gluten, eggs, dairy, soy, corn, peanuts and refined sugar.

Now, after opening additional locations in Collingswood and Bryn Mawr, she'll share her innovative recipes in Baking You Happy: Gluten-Free Recipes from Sweet Freedom Bakery, coming this month from Peter Pauper Press.

Here are highlights from my phone chat with her.

Q: For a long time, it seemed you felt proprietary about the recipes you'd developed. What made you decide to share them?

A: I did feel proprietary about it in the beginning, very territorial. I felt like I'd just worked so hard, I didn't want to hand it over.

We had a few emails from people overseas, "Is there any way you could share X, Y and Z, how you made this so I could make it for . . . , " and so I think that pulled at my heartstrings.

Also, my manager, Jen Kremer, is a dream come true, so when I was pregnant with my twin daughters, I wanted to be involved with the bakery when I physically couldn't be there on my feet.

So: "Let's start working on the cookbook!" I started putting everything together, and having the babies really kind of helped me push forward, because I had to get it finished. I knew that as soon as I had them, I wouldn't have a lot of time to devote to it.

Q: Is there one place around here where someone can find all the special ingredients you use?

A: Not sure, but all the ingredients can be sourced locally. Whole Foods is a good bet, also places like Essene [Market & Cafe], Mom's Organic [Market] out in the suburbs. When in doubt, go on Amazon.

Q: Some of your customers come to these diets from an ethical perspective, but is your making allergen-free food accessible also an ethical pursuit?

A: Yeah, there's no reason for somebody with food allergies or special diets to have to feel left out or feel restricted, and that's really what we're all about.

When you have a special diet, or a special lifestyle and a diet that goes along with it, or you have a food allergy that you really have to be conscious of and think about when you put every bite in your mouth, it becomes a bigger part of your life, and therefore it becomes more of a passion.

To us, it's a labor of love.

Q: You have creative concoctions like a brownie chocolate sundae cupcake, a French toast cupcake. Can just anything be turned into a cupcake?

A: Yeah, sometimes it's like a meal in a wrapper. We've made vegan bacon from shredded coconut to make a morning breakfast cupcake. You can pretty much make anything into a cupcake. Our bakers really enjoy coming up with new things.

Q: You use coconut sugar, coconut oil, coconut flour - can coconut be used for everything?

A: I'm a big coconut fan, clearly. I feel like coconut got a bad rap in the '90s and the early 2000s. No one really knew about or heard about coconut sugar back when we opened up our first location.

I developed all the recipes using coconut sugar because I learned the hard way that white sugar is not my friend.

On the other hand, it's the one allergen people call and say, "Oh, everything that you have is wonderful, and my son is already X, Y and Z and a vegan and gluten free, but he also has allergies to coconut. Is there anything you can do?"

That's the one thing that it's a little bit tricky for us to avoid.

Q: When I wrote about you in the Daily News, in 2010, you said you had yet to perfect the lemon bar. But there it is in the cookbook. What about the other tricky thing mentioned - Key lime pie?

A: We've got all the different parts. We would just need to assemble it together. I'm glad you brought that up - it would be an interesting thing to debut in the holiday season and see how it sells.

See, with this kind of baking, once you get a solid foundation, you can really just build upon it - do variations and twists. You've already laid the groundwork, done the grunt work, and then it just becomes fun.

@V4Veg on Twitter.