Dédé Wilson: The Wedding-Cake Baker Who Couldn’t Eat Her Own Recipes

For about twenty-five years, Dédé Wilson made desserts for a living that she could not comfortably eat. She would taste during recipe testing, she has written, “and then I would serve the dish to everyone else.” That is a startling thing to learn about someone whose first book was The Wedding Cake Book, who spent more than a decade as a contributing editor at Bon Appétit, and who has written 17 cookbooks, by her count. It is also the origin story of FODMAP Everyday, the low-FODMAP recipe and IBS site she co-founded with her lifelong friend and former bakery partner, Robin Jaffin, and the reason people on a demanding elimination diet can still find a tested recipe for birthday cake.

The careerThree decades of pastry, and a secret

Wilson studied at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and began as a pastry chef in nearby Northampton, according to a 2013 alumni profile. Restaurants, catering and a bakery she owned with Jaffin followed. The Wedding Cake Book came out from Macmillan in 1997 and, her bio notes, was nominated for an IACP Julia Child award. Her Bon Appétit recipes made the magazine’s cover, among them, by her account, a white chocolate tiramisu trifle in December 2007. She hosted a monthly Bon Appétit segment on CBS’s The Early Show from 2007 to 2009, fronted her own public-television cooking series, Seasonings with Dédé Wilson and The Holiday Table, and in 2013 launched Bakepedia, a reference site for home bakers.

For almost all of that time she was hiding something. A gastroenterologist told her she had IBS around 1990, she writes. She went gluten- and dairy-free, carried a prescription antispasmodic everywhere, and still had three or four episodes a week for 25 years: intense spasms and bloating that forced her to lie down wherever she was, “and if this meant the dirty floor of a public bathroom, then that’s what it had to be.” Outside close family, nobody knew. The recipes kept coming.

The slip of paperSpring 2015

The turn came in February and March 2015, when Wilson was admitted to hospital three times with pancreatitis. Its cause, she writes, was never definitively found, and she was referred to specialists in Boston. But the gastroenterologist on call, Dr Joseph Tassoni, took an interest in the other problem. He told her he did not let his patients stop at an IBS diagnosis without finding out what was driving the symptoms, and suggested that once she was stable, she look into a new diet. “Let me write it down for you,” he said, and handed her a slip of paper with one word on it: FODMAP. His advice, as she recalls it, was to get Monash University’s app “and just pay attention to their information.” The suggestion was about her IBS; the pancreatitis was a separate matter for the hospital.

She was stunned. “I was a serious food person,” she writes, and she had never heard the word. As she read Monash’s food lists from the hospital bed, the rules looked arbitrary. Raspberries yes, blackberries no. Then it clicked: her symptoms had always seemed random, too. “What if my random and this random matched?!” She decided that her first day out of hospital would be day one of a strict 30-day elimination phase. The hospital kitchen’s idea of a gentle meal, chicken broth and toast, was already off her list; she thinks she ended up with plain white rice and some tea.

The rebuildA pastry chef relearns her own craft

Then the recipe developer took over. Low-FODMAP is not low-everything; the question is usually which foods, and how much. “If someone could create amazing meals with Elimination worthy ingredients, it was me,” she writes. About 30 days in, she emailed Kate Scarlata, the Massachusetts dietitian whose FODMAP writing she had found “clear and trustworthy”, to say that “the book that needed to be written hadn’t been written yet and that we were the ones to do it.” The Low-FODMAP Diet Step by Step, pairing Scarlata’s diet guidance with more than 130 of Wilson’s recipes, was published in December 2017. Our profile of Kate Scarlata covers her side of the partnership.

Wilson also saw a gap. Most help at the time, she writes, covered the elimination and challenge phases and not how to live with the results “for the long haul.” Hence the name FODMAP Everyday, and the method the site is built on: Eliminate, Challenge, Integrate. Baking, her specialty, was the obvious front. Regular wheat flour and milk, two pillars of any pastry kitchen, are both high-FODMAP in typical amounts, so her recipes are built gluten-free and lactose-free and developed in the site’s own test kitchen. Her 275-page baking e-book opens with the premise of the whole enterprise: “It is perfectly possible to enjoy baked goods while following the low FODMAP diet – even during the Elimination phase!” The cake index runs from blackout cake to angel food, and her birthday round-up begins: “It really is someone’s birthday every day, and they deserve a treat!”

The partnershipThe friend from the bakery

Early in planning the site, Wilson went looking for Jaffin. The two had owned the bakery together, closed it in the late 1990s, and then, as Jaffin tells it, gone about twenty years without really talking. There was no falling-out; life simply took them different ways. Jaffin had spent 18 years with Verité, a human and labor rights organization, and had recently stepped away when a Facebook message arrived from her old partner: “Whoa I had a dream about you last night.” They formed a company, Shift Works Partners, which owns FODMAP Everyday, and split the work: Jaffin runs the technology, business development, video and brand relationships, and Wilson runs the test kitchen, which the site says now holds more than 1,000 recipes.

Wilson is not a dietitian or a doctor, and the site is set up around that fact. She describes herself as a professional recipe developer who has completed Monash University’s low-FODMAP training for dietitians and is accredited as a FODMAP educator by FODMAP Friendly, the Australian certification program, which lists FODMAP Everyday as an accredited partner. The site’s evidence articles come from a separate roster of registered dietitians it calls its Success Team, and the message is consistently pro-medicine. “Remember, it is ALWAYS recommended that you get a definitive diagnosis from a medical doctor and recommendation to start the diet,” Wilson wrote in 2025, adding that working with a dietitian “is the best way to succeed on the diet.” Today she calls herself a “happy, healthy, pain-free, symptom-free FODMAPer.” That is her experience, not a promise the diet makes.

What the research actually measuredThe diet behind the desserts

The low-FODMAP diet is one of the better-studied diet approaches in gut health, with limits worth knowing. The American College of Gastroenterology’s 2021 IBS guideline recommends “a limited trial” of it to improve overall IBS symptoms. A 2022 network meta-analysis in Gut pooled 13 randomized trials with 944 patients and ranked it first of the approaches compared; against people’s usual diet, the chance that symptoms did not improve was about a third lower. The authors also note that most of those trials ran in specialist clinics and did not test the reintroduction phase. That phase is not a formality. In a 2012 trial of 41 people with IBS, four weeks of restriction lowered levels of bifidobacteria, compared with people on their usual diet; these are gut bacteria that feed on some of the same carbohydrates the diet removes, and what that means long term is still unclear. Monash University’s own guidance is a strict phase of two to six weeks, then a structured reintroduction toward a less restrictive, personalized diet, ideally with a trained dietitian, and it notes that roughly one in four people with IBS do not improve on the diet. Wilson’s Eliminate, Challenge, Integrate maps onto those same three steps. Our bloating guide covers the other common causes of bloating.

The disclosure mapWhere her interests sit

Wilson earns from her cookbooks, including The Low-FODMAP Diet Step by Step, which the site promotes, and from FODMAP Everyday, which she co-owns with Jaffin through Shift Works Partners of Amherst, Massachusetts. The site sells advertising, sponsorships, product reviews, recipe development and spokesperson work; runs a shop and an Amazon affiliate store; carries an affiliate link to a meal-planning service; sells low-cost e-books; and is listed as an affiliate partner by FODMAP Friendly. Its newsletter carries partner features, including a recent one with the enzyme maker FODZYME, whose founder we have profiled. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with Wilson, FODMAP Everyday or any of these companies. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from her. Anyone with ongoing digestive symptoms should start with their own doctor, since other conditions can look like IBS.