About

The Cookies That Fooled Everyone (Including Me)

I grew up in a family where food meant love. My Italian grandmother and mother taught me to hand-make pasta, and my dad, who liked to say he was “Italian by marriage,” always had a sourdough starter bubbling and fresh bread ready for the table. Cooking and eating were a family affair, and I had a really loving family. So, for me, food has always meant love.

Then came celiac disease.

Suddenly the thing that meant love was the thing that could make me sick. I’ll be honest, most of the gluten-free food out there tasted like a compromise. So I started baking my own, and I didn’t stop until it tasted like the real thing.

The blind taste test

When I was getting ready to open my bakery and ice cream shop, I ran a blind tasting. I baked four kinds of cookies, peanut butter, sugar, brownie and chocolate chip, and made each one twice: once with traditional flour and once gluten-free. They sat right next to each other, unlabeled. I wasn’t planning to go all gluten-free. I just wanted to know what people liked.

More than 100 people tasted them. Nobody picked the traditional cookies. Every time, in every flavor, they chose my gluten-free ones.

It was insane. I went home stupefied. It felt like the universe was telling me something: make the shop 100% gluten-free.

“Nobody’s going to come”

Then I started telling people the plan. Everyone said the same thing: Don’t do that. That’s business suicide. Nobody’s going to come to a gluten-free bakery.

So I was holding two truths at once. Nobody wanted gluten-free, and everybody chose gluten-free when they didn’t know.

That gap is where MoonScoops was born. Four years and more than 200,000 customers later, at our shop near my hometown in California, most of them never guessed it was gluten-free. And it’s where Unbelievably GF was born too.

The obstacle is the way

They say the obstacle is the way. Celiac disease could have taken food-as-love away from me. Instead, it became my whole mission: to prove that living gluten-free doesn’t mean giving up flavor, comfort, or joy.

Here you’ll find the recipes that fooled my customers, my family and more than a hundred blind taste-testers. Make them, serve them, and don’t tell anyone. Let them find out after the second helping, or when they beg you for the recipe. Because that’s what always happens: “Oh my gosh, this is so good. I need your recipe.”

Welcome to the table.

Lisa Belle Marsh | The Undercover Gluten-Free Baker