We are an allergy friendly kids food and recipe blog. Co-created by Olive (10 years old) and Kylie, a daughter-mom team with a passion for all things delicious. Smile Cafe is the ever expanding cookbook of recipes we’ve developed living with multiple food allergies. All our recipes are completely free of the top 6 (and sometimes 8) food allergens!

A diagnosis of food allergy has a huge impact on over 2.6 million people in Canada. With the highest average being in children (1 in 13 kids). Of those kids, approximately 40% have life threatening allergies to more than one type of food. Olive is one of them.

With such a huge number of kids in the same ‘free-from’ boat, we wanted to share our favourite kid-approved allergy friendly recipes. We hope by sharing our recipes we might help kids to create their own safe and scrumptious foods. And maybe even build a healthy dose of food confidence at the same time.

When we found out that our daughter had anaphylaxis to eggs, dairy, peanuts and treenuts we had a lot to learn in order to safely navigate things like daycare, school, sports, birthday parties, travel and eating out. We’ve been so lucky to have such wonderfully supportive people in all of these avenues who recognise that food safety is important, and that allergy kids being included in food activities and events is also important.

In stark contrast to careful and controlled food handling when out in the world, at home we make food a fun and creative activity to do together. Experimenting in the kitchen has been a source of limitless inspiration and empowerment, and one we can all enjoy the results of!

Why Smile Cafe?

Olive named this allergy friendly kids blog Smile Cafe because as she puts it. All kids, allergic or not, can come here to safely make and eat yummy food. And if that’s not something to smile about, I don’t know what is!

All recipes we feature do not have:

• Dairy
• Eggs
• Peanuts
• Tree nuts
• Fish
• Shellfish
• Crustaceans
• Sesame
• Mustard

Some of the recipes we feature do not have:

• Soy
• Wheat