The Never Ending Maintenance Doses

You know how we spent months building up to baked milk? Well, the thing they don’t tell you at the allergist office when you embark on a build up or OIT- you have to keep eating that thing. Forever. Or there’s a risk that the reactivity to that food allergen can come back. Most of the research has been on peanut, but they’ve found that even just reducing daily intake can reverse all the work of the buildup.

We’ve already been through a similar issue with tree nuts. Even though we didn’t have to go through OIT, when she passed her food challenge, we had to continue to give her that nut on a regular basis or she might develop a food allergy. This wasn’t bad when it was just eating almond butter every few days. But now we have to eat almonds, cashews, and pecans on a regular basis. Even with the frequency of toddler snacks, there are still only so many meals a day!

At least with tree nuts, we can buy nut butters and spread them on a cracker and call it a day. To get baked milk in her, I’ve made blueberry muffins and banana muffins and chocolate chip muffins and pumpkin muffins and chocolate cake and cupcakes and there’s only so much baking I want to do. My older kid would gladly eat baked goods for every meal, but the one that is supposed to eat it daily? She’s so over it. Oh, we want a three year old to eat this muffin and she knows it’s super important to us? Yeah. She’s not touching that.

I’ve just given up on muffins and just make cake all the time. But even that has lost its appeal. This past week I tried to make cake pops for the first time. You know, cake crumbs, mixed with icing, dipped in chocolate with sprinkles? There’s no way a three year old would turn up her nose at that, right? And she can't just lick the icing off of the cupcake because it's mixed in! It's perfect! Right...?

A denuded cake ball. 100% of baked milk protein left behind.

I can’t wait until there’s a baked milk powder that we can just sprinkle in food. That way I would never have to make muffins again and she wouldn't have to eat an entire muffin every night to get her maintenance dose of baked milk. Because you know what she’s definitely not going to do? Eat an entire muffin.