Wollenberg - Livias Kitchen: Naturally Sweet and Indulgent Treats

Olivia is the founder and Director of Livias Kitchen, which manufactures and sells sweet treats and desserts with nutritional twists. Livias Kitchen began in 2014 when, drawing on her background in academic Psychology and Neuroscience at University College London, and her own first-hand experience of food intolerance, Olivia set out to create a unique food and lifestyle business to remedy the lack of healthy dessert and sweet options in the market. She believes it is important for everyone to be able to satisfy their sweet cravings with delicious and indulgent treats, and she wants to show people that this can be done by using simple and natural ingredients. The Livias Kitchen Crumbles, currently stocked (among other places) in Selfridges and Planet Organic, are the companys flagship product and a quintessentially British dessert.

Life is too short, you shouldnt deny yourself treats, and here Olivia offers a wonderful collection of naturally sweet and indulgent alternatives to enjoy in a nourishing way.

Including over 100 ingenious raw and baked treats made without gluten, dairy and refined sugar, Olivia uses entirely natural ingredients to create sweets that are nutritious as well as delicious and indulgent.

Featuring pancakes, cookies, slabs, tarts, cakes, puddings and crumbles, these quick and simple treats are better for you, taste amazing and will satisfy any sweet tooth.

The Livias Kitchen Story

With this book I am welcoming you into my kitchen, my absolute favourite place in the world. I learnt how to cook in this kitchen and some of my happiest memories were made here. From being taught by my Mum to make some of her favourite recipes, to baking cakes and dancing around with my two older sisters, my kitchen holds such a special place in my heart. I feel so lucky to have been able to build a business that revolves around my happy place, and I hope that the ideas that were born here bring huge happiness to lots of you, too.

It is hard to know how far back to go in a section titled how it all began. With an extremely vivid memory of my childhood, Im confident that I could write pages and pages about why the kitchen became my happy place, but I will try to keep it short and sweet! The kitchen in my family home was the central point where we spent most of our time together. It seemed to be the place where we all wanted to be. Going back as far as primary school days, I can remember that my two older sisters and I would do everything in our kitchen from our homework and playing games to practising instruments just so that we could keep my Mum company whilst she rustled up something amazing. She used to say that cooking for the family was her number one pastime, and I really hope it was since she did it almost every night! Even when I was doing my own thing in the kitchen, I was always aware of what my Mum was doing, and wondered how she could create such delicious meals for all of us with such ease.

My Mum says she recognised my love affair with cooking from a really young age, and because of that she spent many hours teaching me basic skills which she said would last me a lifetime. One of the things I was most enthusiastic to learn was how to make a traditional Shabbat dinner. For those of you who dont know, it is a Jewish tradition for families to come together over a big meal on a Friday evening. Although my family are not at all religious, and I dont hold many religious beliefs, what was and always will be important to me is keeping up with the traditions that encourage family time (and, of course, eating). Chicken soup is one of the traditional dishes served at a Friday night dinner, and my Mums has to be the absolute best in the world. In fact, this was one of the dishes she showed me how to make when I was about ten. Standing on a little stool, I used to peer into the industrial-sized saucepan she insisted on using even when just cooking for the five of us (a classic trait of a Jewish lady a chronic fear of underfeeding), and watch carefully whilst she made this magic potion. Her guidelines for making the most delicious, comforting soup will never be forgotten. For that, and for so many other things my Mum has taught me, I am so grateful.

So, my interest in food was always there, and that is why I found it so tough to bring myself to see a nutritionist when I realised that certain foods were making me unwell. I had had a really sensitive stomach since the age of about seventeen, but I had never been able to fully identify what was causing the pain I experienced after eating. In my early twenties, my stomach became increasingly sensitive and I began to feel quite unwell after pretty much every meal. In the new year of 2014, I had had enough. I felt like the pain I experienced after eating was crippling me and interfering with everyday life. So I went to see a qualified nutritionist. The nutritionist only had to take one look at the food diary I had been keeping for two weeks prior to my appointment to identify that I was having problems with a group of foods she called FODMAPs. I had never heard of FODMAPs before. FODMAPs stands for fermentable oligo-saccharides, di-saccharides, monosaccharides and polyols. These FODMAPs are forms of dietary sugars (carbohydrates) which cause problems with digestion and absorption in people with digestive issues. Such people may be put on to a low-FODMAP diet to reduce the presence of these indigestible sugars in the gut, and this is what I was advised to do. A low-FODMAP diet targets certain carbohydrates and so the list isnt as simple as cutting out whole food groups.

Without a doubt, the hardest part of changing my diet was having to cut out the sweet snacks and desserts I used to love so much. Cupcakes with butter icing, jam doughnuts and gooey chocolate cakes were just a few of the many things I used to eat to satisfy my sweet cravings. Being intolerant to wheat and dairy meant I couldnt go near those types of foods anymore. And removing these items from my diet was especially hard because I found that even when I went to health-food shops or supermarkets to find gluten- and dairy-free products, they were often full of artificial preservatives and additives, which I also have to stay away from.

It was around the time of having to revise my diet that other parts of my life were also drastically changing. I had been studying Psychology and Neuroscience at University College London for five years and had loved this academically stimulating subject. However, I started to think that there might be something else out there for me, and that I may be better suited to the world of business, where I would be able to be more creative and socially interactive. In time I thought that nothing would be better than combining business with my love for cooking and new passion for healthy eating and living, which had arisen from having to change my diet. Deciding to leave neuroscience behind and embark on a completely new career wasnt an easy decision, but once I had chosen to go with my idea, I was immediately committed to it and hugely excited by the prospect and lifestyle change. The challenge was on!