CELEBRITY chef Ed Halmagyi once begged Nancy Gibson for her secret pastry recipe.

And cooking doyenne Margaret Fulton offered Nancy her tip for making the perfect batch.

"Everyone wants to know how to make good gluten-free pastry but I'm not telling anyone," says Nancy, from her Concongella kitchen near the Grampians.

"I met Ed (from Better Homes and Gardens) at the Wimmera Field Days and he asked me for the recipe because he thought it worked so brilliantly, but I told him 'in your dreams'.

"It took me two years to get the recipe right and all I'll say is that I followed a tip Margaret Fulton once gave me to use butter and never margarine."

Nancy's pastry has risen to fame through her line of quiches and pies made under her Scrumlicious range of gluten-free products.

The range includes seven quiches, including ham and spring onion, chicken and avocado, and spinach and fetta, as well as five pies, such as the ever-popular turkey and meat.

There is also a smaller range of biscuits, cakes, jams, pickles and mustards. Nancy, 65, launched the business in June 2006, after she discovered she was gluten-intolerant to products such as wheat, barley and rye - following a lifetime of undiagnosed illness.

"As a kid I loved Weet-Bix and porridge, but I'd get so tired and no one ever assessed it," she says.

"In 2005, my daughter was diagnosed and so for three months, I decided not to eat gluten and I never felt better in my life.

"I went back on it and I lasted a week. I was so sick with headaches and pains in my stomach.

"I immediately saw a hole in the market because all the gluten-free food was bland, tasteless and full of additives. I ate a gluten-free pizza that even the dog wouldn't eat."

So after much trial and error, Nancy hit upon the perfect gluten-free pastry and other recipes.

She says as one of seven children growing up in Horsham, she cooked her first roast at the age of seven.

"My mother had the philosophy that you can't learn any younger, so start today and so she asked me to cook lunch, a full roast with rolly polly pudding," she says.

Nancy went on to be a pre-school teacher, a teacher of the deaf, and a masseur. But it is with Scrumlicious where she has found her calling, which she hopes to turn into a cafe on her 8ha property.

She says the business encompasses her family's work ethic.

"We were always taught to do something once and do it right. Our family philosophy was, if an opportunity comes, assess it, but don't knock it back."