The sweet life

With advice coming from all directions, it can be difficult to navigate the oversaturated and complicated health food industry. Should you eliminate all sugars from your diet? Should you go keto, paleo or vegan? Should you try some form of fasting?

For Sasha Lipton, founder of Redwood City desserts company Clean Sweets by Sasha, it’s always been about enjoying food while consuming nutritionally dense ingredients. Since March, Lipton has been making and selling cakes, muffins, cookies and other desserts with no grains, gluten, soy, dairy or refined sugar — basically, the ingredients that people associate with baked goods.

“There are a ton of gluten-free and vegan bakeries, but vegan and gluten-free doesn’t mean healthy in any sense. There are tons of sugar and gums and thickeners and weird oils added to make those baked goods be the texture and taste that you would expect,” Lipton said. “I think the more simple, the better. I’m staying true to that.”

After plenty of trial and error, Lipton created a base recipe. She uses almond flour, which she said makes her desserts more dense, and replaces butter and cream with coconut oil. She sweetens her desserts, made in her home kitchen, with maple syrup. She makes everything from lemon poppyseed muffins and banana bread to peanut butter blondies, vegan raspberry thumbprint cookies and coconut chocolate chip cookies.

When she was living in New York in 2014, a doctor told Lipton to cut out grains, gluten, dairy, refined sugar and soy from her diet to remedy her cystic acne. She quickly realized there were few truly healthy sweets available. Motivated by a major sweet tooth, Lipton, who has baked and cooked throughout her life, started to experiment in the kitchen, making healthier variations of her favorite sweets.

As her skin started to clear up and she started to feel more energetic, she said she started sharing her baked goods with family and coworkers.

“I didn’t tell people that they were healthy and people loved (them),” Lipton said. “They were asking for recipes and raving about them as if they were just a traditional baked good. I kind of felt like I had something there.”

She moved to the Bay Area in September and while she was in the tech industry, she said she didn’t feel passionate about her work. She instead decided to pursue her passion project, quitting her day job to start Clean Sweets in March.

Lipton said she hopes to help other people who are trying to be more conscious of the ingredients that they put into their bodies while also making a delicious product.

“I don’t want to make baked goods that taste good for being healthy,” she said. “I wanted to make baked goods that taste good and happen to be healthy.”

Her baked goods are available online ( Clean Sweets by Sasha) for delivery or pickup in Redwood City and for sale at Bare Bowls in Palo Alto and the Sigona’s Farmers Market at Stanford Shopping Center. Lipton also takes special orders for events.

She continues to experiment — right now, think a healthier version of a rainbow cookie that uses spinach and turmeric for color — and hopes to focus more on seasonal ingredients in the future, such as pumpkins in the fall or ginger during the holidays. Her goal is to open a brick-and-mortar bakery, ideally in Palo Alto, where people can have a cup of coffee and a slice of guilt-free cake.

“As people start to understand what certain foods do to their body and what’s happening on the inside because of those foods, I think healthy baked goods will become more and more mainstream,” Lipton said.

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