Every once in a while a Daring Bakers Challenge will come up that isn’t so much a test of skill as it it a test of patience. All the steps in the recipe are easy. It’s just that there are a lot of steps. And I don’t mind putting aside a couple of hours of my day to make a recipe, especially if I really want to eat it. With this one in particular, the oddly named Nanaimo Bar, I was a wolf that spotted its prey. That bar was going to be mine.

This treat is new to me, yet when I presented these to my Canadian friend, she reacted as though we found her lost puppy. Apparently, these are all over Canada, blanketing the nation like freshly fallen snow, and she was thrilled to get a taste of home. Not having a frame of reference myself, I had to ask her if these rivaled the bars she was used to. She couldn’t really answer because her mouth was too full of Nainamo.

What made the challenge all the more appealing was that the gracious host, Lauren, leads a gluten-free diet. And if I had any smarts, I would lead a gluten-free diet, too. About this time last year, armed with a basket-full of symptoms, I skipped on over to an allergist, to be given the most cursed of diagnoses: I have a wheat sensitivity. Oh, the horrors! This is on par with telling a football player that their knee injury means a permanent hiatus from The Game.

Is this what happens to pastry chefs and gluttons (are they one and the same)? Do they end up eating so much of this one ingredient over their lifetime, more than their fair share, that their body eventually begins to revolt? Kind of like when medical professionals develop an allergy to latex from daily exposure? It’s just a theory, but I’m now seeing more and more friends being forced to admit defeat against wheat. Wheat has turned against us! It’s become an occupational hazard.

Once the shock wore off, I promptly moved into denial. I questioned what the word “sensitivity” really meant. It doesn’t sound very serious, does it? I decided that wheat was going to play the role of a nuisance rather than a life-threatening illness, and brushed the whole thing off. All year I indulged in muffins, and bagels and pasta, and most of all, Dad’s bread. I also watched myself deteriorate into a foggy, depleted, rapidly aging version of my former self. Something was always “off” and it took all year for me to be able to acknowledge the crappy truth. Wheat was sucking the life out of me. Once I quit the offending grain, the symptoms miraculously dissolved.

It’s as if Lauren read my mind. Not only are these bars gluten-free, they contain gluten-free, homemade graham crackers. I got to play around with some new flours and get my first taste (pun?) of what they can do. If you and wheat are still pals, you can substitute regular all-purpose flour for these exotic flours, or you can enjoy the bars even sooner if you use store-bought graham crackers.

So what does this mean for me and this blog? Well, luckily, so many recipes are naturally gluten-free, like frozen parfaits, and mousses, and fruit. There will be those. Still, I don’t think I can fully let go of some traditional favorites, and will continue to bake them, even if I only get a bite and have to reluctantly, heaven forbid, share.

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

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Consider today the beginning of a cookie revolution. This cookie will raise the bar on all other cookies in a way that will make you wish you never met this cookie. All other cookies will be the poor stepchildren of this cookie. You will look upon your old favorite cookies with a whistful expression that will say “I loved you once, but now you’re a sore disappointment.” And then you will turn your back on the old cookies, without a second glance.

There was a time I didn’t know any better myself. I was a young design school graduate hammering away at my first advertising job. Nabisco was one of our clients and they regularly sent us cases of Chips Ahoy and Nutter Butters. We all know what happens when there is free food around. We absentmindedly shovel it in, whether we’re hungry or not. Every afternoon I would grind through an entire sleeveful of these. My hummingbird metabolism didn’t seem to mind, and the cookies were good enough to satisfy my sweet tooth.

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Bread seems to be a category of its own. True, it falls under the “baking” umbrella, but artisan bread bakers snatched up the craft and dragged it to their own specialty bake shops. These people are bread whisperers. They can speak to the dough, smell its needs, and anticipate its every gurgle. They “feed” it starters, and know when to poke and prod it and punch it down, so it doesn’t get too moody. They have a symbiotic relationship with doughs that takes years to develop. I confess, I’m jealous.

Even though I worked in some lovely fine dining establishments, almost none of them baked their own bread. Instead, the bread orders arrived at 5AM from reputable bread bakers, and were quickly ushered in to the kitchen before the light of dawn revealed this shameful secret to the waking New Yorkers. I’m not sure why things worked that way, since chefs typically pride themselves on making everything from scratch. Some even hang their reputations on this.

No other task was too painstaking. I watched the chefs take days to make stocks and sauces, roasting bones, simmering liquids, straining, reducing and straining, then straining again. Hours were spent putting together terrines, baking them gently for hours, and letting them rest over night, so they could be sliced with neurosurgeon precision. Even most of the desserts took multiple sets of hands and several moon cycles to put together. So what about the bread?

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Have you ever tried to edit your blog photos during the day? A sunny day? I’m sitting in front of my computer, which is situated on my desk in front of a bank of windows, wishing they made visors for laptops. The glare is burning my retinas, not to mention I can barely see the all-important gingerbread. I’m trying to situate my torso so I block out some of the rays, wrapping my arm around the screen as though someone is trying to cheat off me. It’s not working. Is it stupid to wear sunglasses indoors, inside your own apartment? Can’t bring myself to do it. True, I picked this apartment because it gets fat beams of light, but right now I’m contemplating moving this whole operation to the back of the closet. Where it’s dark. Where I can agonize properly over the quality of the photos.

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