Look what we found!!

During our food challenge at Duke a couple of weeks ago, our nurse mentioned that she had purchased a candy bar made with sunflower butter at World Market.  The other night we were in the area of our local World Market so we stopped in to see for ourselves.  Look what we found!!

Nut Free Sun Cups!  Remind you of anything??  What a treat!  Abigail has never eaten a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and I can't remember the last time I have eaten one either.  But, this is no ordinary chocolate treat.  It's made in a nut free facility, is organic and is gluten free!  Seth Ellis Chocolatiers in Boulder, Colorado took it a couple of steps further.  They use Fair Trade chocolate, the Sun Cups are Kosher certified and the foil outer-pack is home compostable.  I mean...wow!  Here's the link to their spec sheet if you want to see the full ingredient listing.  By now, though, you are probably wondering how they taste.

The Sun Cups are available in both milk and dark chocolate.  We sampled the milk chocolate cups first (actually they're a blend of both milk chocolate and white chocolate).  Now mind you, we (my husband, son and I) eat sunflower seed butter on a daily basis so we've acquired a taste for it.  Abigail will occasionally eat some on a cracker, but it's not a staple food for her like it is the rest of us.  As to be expected, the cups have a slight sunflower seed taste, but the chocolate is nice and firm, and it's not oily in the center like it's peanut butter counter-part.  Abigail loved them both, but my favorite was the dark chocolate. To me, it had a more rich chocolate taste than the milk chocolate Sun Cup.  They were a hit with all of us, and we had to refrain from opening more packages.

I contacted Seth Ellis Chocolatiers to get some more information.  You can currently purchase these online at www.peanutfreeplanet.com and while Amazon.com has them listed, they're not yet available.  When they told me that World Market is not going to continue stocking them, I took the kids for a little shopping spree (maybe if everyone went on a shopping spree, World Market would change their mind).  The list price for the Sun Cups at World Market is $1.99, but this last weekend they rang up at $1.50.  Today when I purchased them, they were $ .99.  Seeing that, I doubled what was in my basket.

I had another thought as I piled over a dozen packages in my basket today.  If all of our prayers are answered, in another year and a half, Abigail will be through with the clinical trial, and we will be adding peanut products to her diet in order to maintain her tolerance.  One of the issues for children coming out of the clinical trial is that they dislike the taste of peanuts...call it a self-preservation instinct...yet they have to consume a certain amount on a weekly basis.  At some point, I'd planned on eventually working sunflower butter in Abigail's diet so that she'll hopefully have an easier time acquiring the taste for peanuts.  Considering she scoffed down a Sun Cup immediately upon getting in the car today after our shopping spree, this is definitely one way to start.