Reader Appreciation Month and Giveaway #1

Chocolate Hazelnut Crunch Cake

March is a big month for me and my little corner of blogdom. As of tomorrow, All Day I Dream About Food celebrates its 2nd birthday and we head into the third year of creating and writing about my recipes. It's so funny to look back on the start of this little endeavour. I've said it so many times before, but it really was just started on a whim. I had recently become a stay-at-home mother following the birth of my third child, and was tooling around the internet, looking up healthy recipes. Food blogs weren't really much on my radar at that point, but I kept coming across them in my search. I was hooked almost instantly, and it hit me that one did not need to be a professional cook to write a food blog. It seemed like fun, so I decided to start my own. I did not know, at that point, that the gestational diabetes I had during pregnancy would decide to stick around. I posted maybe once every few weeks, whenever I felt like it, and the blog really had no purpose at all. It also had no readers at all, beyond my friends and family.

Toasted Coconut Ginger Blondies, Chocolate Coconut Flour Cupcakes with Espresso Buttercream, Thai Coconut Bread Pudding with Vanilla Cardamom Cream

It was my foray into low carb and gluten free baking that truly inspired me to blog with purpose. As I experimented and played with these new ingredients, slowly getting used to the way they behaved and gaining some skill, I realized I had a lot more to offer to the general public. With each success, I gained confidence and it wasn't long before I knew I was onto something. I was pretty good at this, and good at coming up with new, creative ways to use these alternative ingredients. Slowly, through various channels, my blog began to gain traction and people began to pay some attention. It's really been an exciting journey, to see the way it's taken off and I am excited to see where it will yet take me.

And I know full well that I wouldn't be able to be on this journey without my readers. In appreciation of the fact that anyone beyond my immediate family wants to read my blog, I am doing a series of giveaways this month. I have targeted some of my favourite products and asked the companies to join me in celebrating my blogiversary (and my own birthday, coming up in a week or so). I want you, my readers, to get a chance to try out some of my favourite low carb and gluten free products.

Gingerbread Pancakes, Mini Lemon Ricotta Bundt Cakes, Coconut Flour Crepes with Lemon Ricotta

So, my first giveaway is for one of my favourite alternative "flours". Tropical Traditions Coconut Flour has been immensely useful to me in my low carb journey and I have made many recipes with it, a few of which I have highlighted here. I've also found their website to be an amazing resource for gluten free recipes, many of which can easily be rendered low carb with a few tweaks. Be sure to check out their Free Coconut Recipes site to find an amazing array of recipes made with their products.

Tropical Traditions has kindly offered to send one of my readers a 1 kg (2.2lb) bag of their premium Organic Coconut Flour.



Contest Rules:

1. Open to US and Canadian Residents only

2. To enter you must either (leave a comment to let me know what you did):

• Subscribe to Tropical Traditions Sales Newsletter OR
• Follow Tropical Traditions on Twitter @troptraditions

3. Additional entries (leave a separate comment for each):

• Follow All Day I Dream About Food on Twitter @dreamaboutfood
• "Like" All Day I Dream About Food on Facebook
• Retweet this post
• Pin or Stumble this post

4. Contest will run until Wednesday, March 7th at 11:59 PM

5. Winner will be chosen at random