Gluten Free, Flavor Full

Fear no more the search for gluten-free cakes and cupcakes for friends and loved-ones with a gluten-intolerance. It's places like this, Tu-lu's gluten-free bakery, aka Tully's Bakery, in the East Village, that motivate food enthusiasts like me to start a blog.

Though I am not one of the 1 in 133 Americans affected by Celiac disease, I do love cupcakes; this is essentially why I'm writing about Tu-lu's, where I recently purchased two large cupcakes.

Behold:




Chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting: First off, you can smell the chocolate when you cut/bite into it. The cake itself is dense with a natural, traditional chocolate flavor. The chocolate frosting is stupendous: intense, bold, yummy. You almost want to search for a hint of brandy in there because the flavor is so intensely savory, but the only intoxicating element in this frosting is the divine taste of rich cocoa. It's also so light that it melts in your mouth.

Vanilla cupcake with vanilla cream-cheese frosting: The cake has a sturdy yet moist texture and a mild vanilla flavor that doesn't seek the limelight, it's more like the wafer cone that holds the frozen custard, which in this case is a robust vanilla frosting with a splendiferous cream-cheese punch.

As soon as I knew it, my glass of milk was empty and I was staring down at a plate of gluten-free crumbs. But in spite of having just devoured two cupcakes, I didn't feel heavy or weighed down. It made me wonder if maybe I have a sensitivity to gluten? I don't, but it's to the baker's credit that these festive treats make you ponder the presence of gluten in your diet as something potentially deleterious to your health rather than other GF baked goods that simply leave you feeling sorry for those who can't eat gluten.

So who's responsible? Quality, as I discover time and time again, is no accident, but the result of training, effort, skill, passion and ability. Owner/baker, Tully, originally from Memphis, Tennessee, studied at Le Cordon Bleu and then moved here to NYC, where she interned at Gramercy Tavern. You can read her story on her Web site which basically describes how she was diagnosed as gluten intolerant and that this twist of fate led her on a search for delicious gluten-free cakes and cookies. There were none to be found, so she strove to create a recipe of her own, ultimately arriving at a winning combination of rice flour, potato flour and tapioca flour along with natural and organic ingredients. What an amazing story of turning trial into triumph, Tully's Bakery is dharma at its most delicious.