This NJ Baker Is Welcoming Everyone to the Dessert Table

(ROCKAWAY, N.J.) – Christine Allen is the owner and CEO of Rockaway’s Mo’Pweeze Bakery, a unique store specializing in vegan, Kosher, and allergen-free products. A Jamaican-born mother of three, Allen started the bakery 12 years ago inspired by her son, Maddox, who has multiple food allergies. The bakery earned second place in Morris & Essex Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Awards for best gluten free bakery in Morris County in 2024 and 2025. Allen spoke to the Click about her baking process.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Click: What kind of training did you receive for making allergen-free foods?

Christine Allen: It was definitely informal. It was all divine intervention. I actually had cupcake dreams. How to come up with the ingredients, how to come up with different formulas, how to frost the cupcake. I would get different ideas about how to put different ingredients together and make it taste good, and also to make it visually appealing as well. I did a lot of research on how to do regular things and then I veganized it. [There were] lots of trials and errors to make sure that things really tasted good and came out the way I wanted it to. Because of our ingredients and how expensive it is, I wanted to make sure that the quality was there as well.

The Click: How is allergen-free baking different from conventional baking?

Allen: The texture is different, the frosting is different, everything is different because we are vegan as well, not just allergen-free, so we don’t use any animal products. I don’t know how to bake with eggs, which is very weird. We use a lot of different things, lots of plant-based stuff. We use a lot of chickpea. Chickpea flour, fava bean flour, sorghum flour. The aquafaba, which is the water that’s in the chickpeas, that’s like gold to us in the vegan community as we use it a lot to make royal icing and meringues. [Being vegan] takes a lot [more] creativity than the conventional ways.

The Click: Should more businesses put effort into catering to people with special dietary needs?

Allen: It’s so important. I don’t think that there’s a lot of businesses that put a lot of emphasis on taking care that their products are allergen-friendly. They sometimes think that people are pretending, which can be very dangerous. It’s important for chefs especially to take that extra effort to make their clients comfortable. One contaminant could end someone’s life. It’s really that serious. If that contaminant is on your plate and it touches something else, that could be deadly. My son was at a restaurant, it was a celebration for him, and he likes pina coladas, typically made with coconut milk. He ordered the pina colada. They brought him the pina colada with regular milk and he took a sip of it. He had an allergic reaction, he had to get the epi pen, he was vomiting, his lip was swollen, his tongue was swollen, just because they didn’t take enough care in understanding or caring that this could actually kill him.

The Click: What kind of feedback do you get from your customers?

Allen: I get great feedback from my customers. I get customers who come in and they’re crying because they’re just so happy a place like this exists. I actually have a customer right now, she’s in Ohio, and she wants me to build a cake and ship it to her because there’s nowhere around her that does what we do. We have customers who have been following us since we started 12 years ago that still purchase from us. It’s a family dynamic.