Happy New Year, Friends! I hope 2018 is starting off easily and peacefully for everyone.
I thought I would start the year off by sharing this easy recipe for Zucchini Muffins. It was my first real victory in gluten free baking…which is saying something since I’ve been gluten free for 4 years.
Obviously if you’re not gluten free (you lucky pizza eaters!) you can make these with regular old all-purpose flour and they will be just as good. In fact, I’m making a regular batch as soon as I post this.
But the secret to finally achieving some small measure of gluten free baking success is finally finding a good GF flour blend that I like. I have lots of books on GF baking but let’s be honest, I’ve been too busy to cook and post recipes so I’m pretty sure that means that I am way too busy to buy, weigh, measure, and concoct my own GF flour blend.
Enter Namaste Gluten Free Flour! (And no, this is not a sponsored post, I’m just sharing the love.) On the advice of my friend Jen, I started searching for this at my Costco. They also sell it at Amazon and I’ve seen their baking mixes in some of the higher end grocery stores like Fresh Market and Whole Foods.
My Costco doesn’t sell it yet (I keep begging) but I was able to buy it from Costco online…the kicker was I had to order a whole case! Good grief. Oh well, it’s happily living in my freezer.
Namaste is what they call a One to One or Cup for Cup GF flour. That simply means that you can make a straight up substitution in your recipes for regular flour without having to add anything extra and weird like xanthan gum.
So back to these muffins, I took my recipe for Zucchini Pineapple Bread and swapped out the flour cup for cup with my new favorite Namaste GF flour.
I added just a little bit more zucchini than the original recipe calls for (about 2 1/2 cups) because I had 2 zucchinis to use up and used a little less brown sugar (about 1/2 cup) because I ran out.
Because GF baked goods can sometimes be dry, I thought I would have more success with muffins rather than the larger loaf. Spoon the batter into greased muffin tins and bake at 350° for 14-15 minutes (for GF) and 20 minutes (for reg.) or until they are golden brown, smell awesome, and a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffins comes out mostly clean.
SUCCESS!!! These are amazingly good warm, right out of the oven, with a little melty butter.
I’m looking forward to trying new recipes and seeing what others I can adapt to be gluten free and still tasty!
Here’s the link to the original post again and the printed recipe.
Here’s the printable recipe – Zucchini Pineapple Bread
And the shopping list – Zucchini Pineapple Bread Shopping List
And if you want the step by step instructions, click HERE for the original bread post which you can convert to muffins.
And since you’ve been so patient with me this fall and my complete abandonment of my poor little website, here is your bonus picture of Tiny Lulu enjoying her new heated bed.
It’s my goal to get more organized with my posts here (hey, maybe actually have a plan – whooohoo!) and have new recipes for you much more frequently.
In a Florida-Is-Weird situation, even though it’s winter everywhere else, I’ve joined a CSA – Community Sustained Agriculture so I’ve been getting bags of fresh vegetables from a nearby organic farm every other week. I’m planning a series of CSA posts so that when everyone else thaws out and you have fresh veggies in your garden or CSA box, you can hopefully go back to the CSA tab and find some fun options for all…that….kale!
Happy New Year. Here we go! (Except Lulu, she’s still napping.) xoxo – C
