Leanne’s Cookbook is the Recipe for Gluten- and Dairy-Free Baking Success

Hell’s Kitchen neighbor Leanne Buckley has taken her love of gluten-free and dairy-free baking to the next level this year by publishing a cookbook of her favorite recipes.

Leanne has been baking for as long as she can remember — starting with Sunday family dinners prepared alongside her mother Shirley Saunders, and cookies and butter cake made from a family recipe that passed down through the generations

“We had fresh baked goods in the house, always,” Leanne said. “They didn’t last long, maybe through Tuesday morning. I have very fond memories of having cake for breakfast before going to school.”

Leanne’s passion for baking took a turn six years ago when she developed an intolerance to gluten and dairy, rendering her tried-and-true recipes inedible. But after nearly a year of trial and error during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she arrived on the perfect substitutions for her baked treats.

The key is to use a mixture of almond flour and gluten-free flour (either from King Arthur’s or Bob’s Red Mill) that leads to not just the right flavor but the right consistency, she explained. Almond flour adds a crumbly texture to cakes and a nice crunch to cookies, Leanne added.

It wasn’t an easy process, and started with a failed attempt at chocolate chip cookies: “I got this gluten-free flour, dairy-free chips, which were really quite good. It smelled right, and then I took it out and they were like hockey pucks,” she said. “Really really horrible.”

“Gluten-free baking can be a landmine, because it’s either gummy or solid as a rock,” Leanne added. But once she got the balance right — with slight adjustments in every recipe — all of Leanne’s family recipes came roaring back to life.

In the interests of research, I decided to bake Leanne’s carrot cake with vegan cream cheese frosting, and was quite impressed with the results. It was one of the most moist and flavorful cakes I have tasted in a long time, although the frosting was quite sweet: an entire pound of powdered sugar is combined with eight ounces of vegan Philadelphia cream cheese and a dash of milk.

I might stick with a dairy frosting next time, although Leanne does have another recipe that uses vegan butter instead of cheese, which is worth a try.

Gluten-free and dairy-free bakers have to spend a pretty penny on the ingredients — in my case over $50 for a single cake. To get the best bang for your buck Leanne recommends buying in bulk, from Costco for example, so the ingredients can be stretched out across multiple baking projects.

I doubled the recipe and made a dozen cupcakes for a friend’s birthday party, and a full double-layer cake that I shared with the W42ST team, who found it “surprisingly moist” and were surprised it was gluten-free (in a good way).

Leanne’s mom, who is also gluten-intolerant, inspired her to transform her passion into a book. After Leanne listed gluten-free baking as her “superpower” in her West Side Story last year , she decided that “the world needs this.”

Some other standouts from the book include black bean brownies (the beans are for texture, not for flavor or nutrition, she assures me), Linzer tarts and an elaborate Christmas cake that can be baked any time of the year. All of the photos in the book were taken and stylized by Leanne, down to the lines on the carrot-shaped frosting decorating the carrot cake.

She’s already planning for her second volume, a deep-dive into the world of dairy-free and gluten-free pastas, pizzas and breads. A long checklist on her phone shows the dishes Leanne is planning on perfecting through multiple attempts. The entire process will likely take her another several years, she estimates.

Leanne’s cookbook, Baking Bliss: Classic Recipes for Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Delights , is available for purchase on Amazon in the US and UK.

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