Imaginary Mom to the Rescue! Blueberry Muffins

There ought to be a special word for the moment you wake up (late) in the morning and realize that you completely forgot to get your son's special GF dessert for the birthday party he's attending in a few hours, on a day when all the bakeries are closed. (If you coin such a word, please let me know what it is and I'll happily promote its widespread usage; I can't be the only one this happens to).

Imaginary Mom pursed her lipsticked mouth, smoothed her perfectly manicured hands over her ruffled apron, and suggested primly, "Why don't you bake something?" I have to admit, my defenses were down. I spent all day yesterday in my pajamas, I hadn't had my first cup of coffee, and the sight of all the clean-and-folded laundry from yesterday made me think that I'm a domestic goddess and this was a perfectly reasonable solution.

The difficulty is that GF baking wants a boatload of very specific ingredients, and you make willy-nilly substitutions at your peril. Baking is fairly precise to begin with; you can play around with spices and swap out nuts and fruit and such, but you need to keep in mind the strict proportions of dry and liquid ingredients, plus things like the leavening power of whatever you're using for leavening and all sorts of other food-sciencey stuff. This is why I am a devoted follower of baking recipes. One cook's special baking blend is invariably different from another cook's baking blend (yes, I realize this should give me confidence that there are multiple right ways to do this - mostly it means that I have a lot of storage containers full of flour blends with the author's name written on side).

These muffins,  then, represented the Holy Grail of GF baking. Normal ingredients! (This is a relative term, obviously. Do most people have xanthan gum in the cupboard?.) ONE kind of flour! A way to use up some of the overpriced impulse-buy blueberries! And fortunately for me, I have a kid who thinks that a blueberry muffin he can eat is a lot better than a birthday cake he can't.

This seemed like a deeply weird recipe at a first glance. That's a lot of eggs and not a lot of flour and I had my doubts, imagining some sort of watery sludge and an end result that looked more like a blueberry quiche of some kind. I clearly underestimated the power of coconut flour, which I've never actually used before (since I hate coconut). It was easy enough to put together that I could imagine whipping up a half-batch of these and making them in the toaster oven on a cold snowy weekday morning. Just kidding. That's Imaginary Mom speaking.

From Recipes for Gluten-Free Kids, by the mysterious "editors of Publications International," also the source of the awesome waffle recipe.

Blueberry Muffins

6 eggs (yes, really)
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup coconut flour, plus an extra teaspoon for the blueberries
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel (this took 2 lemons)
1 cup blueberries

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with paper liners.

Whisk together the eggs, butter, sugar, and milk in a medium bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking powder, and xanthan gum. Sift the flour mixture over the egg mixture, add the lemon zest, and whisk to combine.

Toss the blueberries with the extra teaspoon of coconut flour, then stir them into the batter. You might be surprised at how thick the batter is with such a tiny amount of flour - I certainly was. Spoon the batter into the muffin cups; they'll be more full than a traditional muffin recipe, but they won't rise as much (translation: at all) so it won't make a mess.

The recipe as written says to bake 12-15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into one of the muffins comes out clean. It took closer to 19 minutes before I was confident that we weren't all going to get salmonella from the undercooked eggs; our oven is generally fast rather than slow, so set your timer for 12 minutes and keep an eye on them. The difference between an undercooked muffin and a cooked muffin was immediately obvious.

Cool on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then remove from the pan. These are best served warm. As with all GF baked goods, they're a little spongey and you won't get crumbs; but the degree of sweetness is just right and this recipe comes together very quickly and easily. I don't think they'll win any prizes, but they're easily as good as the ludicrously expensive and oversized frozen ones, and you look like a champ for making homemade.