Gluten Free Bakery in Santee California : Starry Lane Bakery

Biscotti

2013-03-26T19:14:21+00:00

Chocolate Chip Espresso Biscotti
The light flavor of fresh espresso beans with a sweet burst of rich chocolate chips, our Chocolate Chip Espresso biscotti is perfect for the true coffee lover.

Chocolate Cherry Biscotti
A dark chocolate cookie studded with sweet dried cherries and coated in pure dark chocolate; cherries never tasted so good.

Chocolate Orange Biscotti
There’s something about the combination of tangy orange and rich dark chocolate that never fails to tantalize your palate. It’s one of our favorite flavor combinations, which is why we developed the perfect way to highlight such an amazing combination.

Cinnamon Biscotti
For those of you who think “Enough with the chocolate, give us something else!” now we have our increasingly popular Cinnamon biscotti. A crispy cinnamon cookie topped with spicy cinnamon/sugar icing, this cookie will definitely get your taste buds dancing.

Additional Cookies

2013-03-26T19:56:47+00:00

Sugar Cookies
\We love sugar cookies! Who doesn’t? Moist and tender with a sweet icing, there are few things better than a perfectly baked sugar cookie. Whether you come in a pick up a couple of our classic star shapes with white icing, or special order a dozen in customer shapes and colors, we know you’ll be happy with your choice.

Cinnamon Swirls
This cookie was created at the demand of a family member who can never have enough cinnamon. “The sugar cookie is great” she’d say “what about a cinnamon icing?”. Well we didn’t want to ruin a good thing by changing the icing on our sugar cookies, so instead we developed a recipe wholly devoted to cinnamon! A tender cinnamon cookie with sweet/spicy cinnamon icing in a classic bakery shape, it was a hit, and our customers love them too.

Mocha Curls
If you are a past customer of Starry Lane Bakery you know how we feel about the combination of coffee and chocolate, it’s awesome! Our Mocha Curls are the best of both worlds with a subtle coffee flavored shortbread dipped with melted dark chocolate. This cookie is not for the faint of heart.

Strawberry Lilies
The Strawberry Lily is our most refined cookie. A delicate butter (not real butter don’t worry) cookie filled with sweet strawberry jam, it tastes as good as it looks.

Halloween

2012-10-17T05:33:20+00:00

Halloween can be a difficult time for families with food allergies. All those treats your neighbors are handing out may be packed with things that will make your little ones sick, or worse. Do your children have food allergies? If so we would love to know how you handle the holidays. So many of our customers are parents of children recently diagnosed with allergies, and Halloween presents a particularly tough challenge. So please, share your ideas, tips, and tricks; and lets all have a safe and happy Halloween!

Cupcakes

2012-11-30T02:40:44+00:00

Marh 28th-March 30th

Classic Cookies

2013-03-26T19:25:28+00:00

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The perfect after school snack or midnight munchies. Sweet, Soft, and studded with rich chocolate chips , they’re enough to bring out the kid in anyone.

Old Fashioned Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Crisp oats, plump raisins, rich brown sugar, your grandma sure knew what she was doing when she pulled a tray of these out of the oven. The scent, taste, and texture of our old fashioned oatmeal raisin cookies would do anyone’s granny proud.

Oatmeal Triple Chocolate Chunk Cookies

One of our Best-Seller's, this is a cookie that is Loved and adored by chocoholics the world over. Loaded with cocoapowder, chocolate chips, and big chocolate chunks, its sure to satisfy any craving.

Coconut Macaroons

2013-03-26T19:32:37+00:00

Vanilla Macaroon

A classic cookie for all of the coconut purists out there. Nothing but coconut, vanilla, and sugar. Absolutely no extra flavors to get between you and your coconut fix.

Chocolate Chip Macaroon

Two classic flavors in one satisfying cookie
Sweet vanilla sugar and mini chocolate chips
Grown up version of the kid’s classic.

Dark Chocolate Macaroon

Shredded coconut and rich melted chocolate
An ultimate taste experience
You won't believe it's allergen free and vegan

Sweet Orange Macaroon

This cookie is a new twist on a old favorite
Topped with homemade candied orange peel
The Coconut Macaroon infused with tropical flavor

Macaroon of the Month

Each month we develop a brand new flavor for all of our loyal macaroon lovers. We've come up with lots of great ideas, but we'd love to hear yours. Let us know what you would like to see.

March: Pineapple

April: Lemon Ginger

Jaime's Story

2012-08-15T12:08:43+00:00

At one time or another everyone’s life hits a turning point. The path you’ve been traveling for years, pivots or forks or on rare occasions end in a sharp precipice overlooking a bottomless and terrifying gorge. Perhaps you spent years training for your first big marathon, only to fall down a flight of stairs and fracture your ankle the night before the big race. Or maybe your childhood dream of being a Naval officer was thwarted by the sudden and unrelenting onset of seasickness. My downfall came from a most unexpected source, the snowy white marzipan coating on a three tiered wedding cake.

After four years at Rutgers University studying biology, evolutionary anthropology, genetics, and any other disciplines of science I could fit into my schedule, I realized that spending my life doing lab work held little appeal. Congratulating myself on avoiding a life of boredom, I immediately packed up my sporty little pt cruiser (yes, people still drive them) and headed across the country to attend culinary school at the Art Institute of Ca. Previously baking was something I did to break the stress during finals week, or at 2am when I had a 15 page paper due the next day and was so burned out I couldn’t have typed the alphabet if someone offered my $50.

All of a sudden that thing I did to shut out the world when life was getting to stressfull became a viable career option. I mixed, I chopped, I piped things out of plastic bags with funny shaped tips on the end, and I realized that most of what I was learning was based on the basic scientific principles I had studied during college. The protein strands in egg whites, gluten molecules in rising dough, the way your taste buds react more favorably to flavorings mixed with fat, even why we add salt to sweet things like chocolate. I was learning what to do in culinary school, but I had already learned the why at Rutgers, and wasn’t even aware of it.

Time passed, I graduated culinary school and got a job prepping, cooking, and most importantly baking for a hotel in downtown San Diego. I loved it. I spent all day cooking, people would eat what I made and be happy, which made me feel good so I cooked more and they ate more, and it was perfect. Things were going so well in fact that one of the managers at the hotel asked me to make her wedding cake. It was a gorgeous cake; 3 floating tiers of square dark chocolate cake with panels of marzipan coated in sunshine yellow royal icing, decorated with flood-filled flowers piped to resemble stained glass. Of course I hadn’t made a wedding cake before and I was nervous, it was my boss’s wedding, and it had to be perfect. So I practiced, and I practiced some more, and when I was sure I had it down, I practiced a little more just to be sure. The wedding went off without a hitch; the cake was perfect, everyone was happy, and I went home and had a piece of one of the practice cakes to celebrate. Then my throat closed up.

It was the marzipan. Marzipan is a paste made of sugar and finely ground almonds, and I had been elbows deep in the stuff for weeks. After a rather eventful ER visit, and an extensive allergy test panel at the doctor’s the next day, I was diagnosed with Adult Onset Food Allergies. Or more specifically, I was now highly allergic almonds and cashews.

As anyone who is living with a food allergy knows, overnight the world becomes a scary and uncertain place. Was my burger cooked on the same flat top as the almond encrusted tilapia? Did my candy bar get made on equipment that also makes nougat? Had the friend steeling a sip of my soda just finished eating a handful of spiced cashews? The answer was inevitably yes.

I went through a dozen epinephrine pens that first six months. My family had to relearn how to eat, and how to shop. Almost all processed foods were out, restaurants were chancy (putting my life in the hands of an overworked line cook did not appeal), and all baked goods were out unless I made them myself. Worst of all, my job, the job I loved, disappeared after an ill fated meeting with a batch of rainbow cookies in the kitchen (almond flour and paste are the main ingredients). I couldn’t blame them, I was a liability, and I put my own health and safety at risk every time I entered the kitchen. But what was I going to do, rewind five years and start out as an intern in a lab? Absolutely not! Get a job at Barns and Noble? Tempting, very tempting, but that was not the answer. I loved working in a kitchen, and I didn’t want to stop. The only solution, as outrageous as it seemed, was to open my own place where I could control what ingredients were used, and what products where created.

While I was researching for my business plan, trying to come up with anything that might convince a bank to lend me the truly staggering amount of money needed to open a bakery, I discovered something interesting. There were hundreds of thousands of people in the United States just like me. Children who had to be homeschooled because they couldn’t risk a peanut butter sandwich at lunchtime. Adults who were baking their own bread because they couldn’t eat gluten. It was like an epidemic had swept the country, and the only people who were aware of it were the ones affected. So I started playing with my recipes. Its easy to make a chocolate chip cookie without nuts, but what about eggs? Not so hard as it turned out, but then what if you don’t use the common vegan egg replacer that contains soy? Much, much harder. Then remove the flour. That pancake-like greasy puddle on the cookie sheet? That’s what happens when you remove the flour, or the eggs, or the milk, or one of a hundred other ingredients that may not have one of the top six food allergens, but could be contaminated by one due to how it was processed.

What started as a challenge, a way to fight my way out of the depression that inevitably follows a health crisis, became a passion. How many people are there out in the world who crave an honest to goodness chewy oatmeal raisin cookie just like their grandmother baked, but are allergic to the ingredients it takes to make one? As it turns out, a lot.Unfortunately not all of the allergen free baked goods on the market today would pass the grandmother test. Maybe they taste allright, but they look like half baked balls of dough, or it appears to be a perfectly normal cookie, but when you bite into it your mouth is coated by some odd oily substance that doesn’t go away no matter how much water you drink.

The truth is its difficult to bake great desserts without flour, butter, and milk, very difficult. But its not impossible. By deconstructing each cookie, determining the cause and effect of each ingredient and their combinations, and using a basic knowledge of how molecules interact with each other during the baking process, I was able to develop recipes that taste, feel, and look as much like the genuine article as it is possible to get them. There were failures, and they were epic, but the successes more than made up for them, Crisp biscotti coated in chocolate, dense moist macaroons with candied orange peel, soft chocolate chip cookies, and a jam filled shortbread that you have to taste to believe.

All those times I dreamed about the future when I was a kid, I never saw myself here. Owning my own business now or waking up at 5am every morning to essentially bury myself in cookie dough or spending hours each night pouring over accounts and product catalogues. I hit my turning point, swerved off the road, and found to my surprise that I’m thoroughly enjoying the scenic route.

Shortbread

2013-03-26T18:57:42+00:00

Raspberry Shortbread
A delicate soft vanilla cookie with raspberry jam. Perfect with an afternoon cup of coffee or tea. This delightful cookie is dusted with powdered sugar.

Chocolate Strawberry Swirl
A tender chocolate shortbread cookie filled with sweet strawberry jam, drizzled with pure dark chocolate. Chocolate covered strawberry fans everywhere can rejoice! We have found a way to turn your favorite indulgence into an easily portable snack.

Lemon Shortbread
A sophisticated cookie, our lemon shortbread is perfect for when you don’t want something intensely sweet. Instead its soft melting texture and piquant icing are the perfect combination of tangy and savory.

Orange Shortbread
One of our most delicate shortbread, the dough itself contains fresh orange zest which is accentuated by the orange infused icing drizzled on top of each cookie.