Thursday, October 11, 2007

Fruity Gluten-free Muffins

Today is my last day in class with the teacher who has Coeliac's disease and thus needs to eat gluten-free foods. I decided to give a muffin-recipe a go, using rice flour and some fruity essence. I took the recipe largely from here and, as per usual, did some modifications. This made 11 (I know... odd number) smallish muffins. Anyway, I must warn, they turned out nice but nothing amazing unfortunately. If I were to make them again, I would up the amount of honey/sugar, for sure. Also, definitely more jam... I could hardly taste it. The rice flour was alright... a bit grainy but I guess that's what it's like. Oh well.
Prepare:
-Melt 60g (4 tbsp) of butter in the microwave (about 45 seconds)
-In a large bowl, mix butter, 2 eggs, 2 tbsp honey, 1 tsp vanilla, zest of an orange, and 1 cup milk (I used 1/3 cup vanilla yogurt and 2/3 cup milk) (I also made a batch that had about 1 tbsp of Milo - a drinking chocolate powder)-Mix into the bowl 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tbsp baking powder, and 2 cups rice flour
-Add in dried fruit, if you'd like (I added dried currants and cranberries - not too much)Cook:
-Preheat oven to 375F/180C
-Grease muffin pan
-Add a heaping tbsp of batter into the muffin pan
-Add 1/2 tsp or so of jam (I used blackberry) onto the batter, then cover with another 1/2-1 tbsp of batter. I also made 1 batch that had jam and peanut butter inside-Bake for 25 minutes
-Let cool on a cooling rack, dust with icing sugar
Tips:
-The butter will coagulate/thicken when mixed with the milk and eggs. I don't know if that was supposed to happen... I tried to whisk it as smooth as possible and then add the flour right away and whisk a lot and it seemed to look like a pretty homogeneous mixture.
-You could substitute for the fruit (or add) nuts or chocolate chips. For the orange zest you could use nutmeg/cinnamon/clove combo for that flavor.

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