Muffin Madness

As I mentioned here, I've kicked off Christmas baking season at my house, and I'm starting to experiment with some gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free and egg-free baking recipes.  At some point, I plan to go back to my rice flour sugar cookies, which are already reminiscent of shortbread, and see if I can kick them up another Christmas-y notch.  (Cranberries and candied mixed peel, perhaps?)  However, today I thought I'd start my investigation of cakes and muffins.

What makes Christmas baking?  For me, it's all about the spices and the fruit.  All other times of the year, I'm all over the chocolate - chocolate cake, chocolate brownies, chocolate chip cookies, etc.  But once December hits, then the dried fruit comes out.  I did a survey of my baking cupboard today: sultana raisins, golden raisins, currants, craisins, apricots, candied ginger, and candied mixed peel.  And then I moved onto my spice cupboard, where I found cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, and allspice.  What to do with all this bounty?

It's my goal this season to find a really good spice cake recipe that I can turn into a fantabulous layer cake, using my super-secret apple filling.  (Ok, not that secret - I promise, once I've finalized the recipe, I'll pass it along).  However, today, I wanted to make individually-portioned baking, because I also need December  birthday baking for my choir.  So, I opted for muffins instead.

All of which brings me to this recipe.  It's actually a muffin recipe I unearthed awhile back, and I even tried to use it for the December birthday baking.  Except that sucanut looks a lot like ground flax seed, and I accidentally added flax instead of sugar.  Which left me with very dense, very not-sweet (but very healthy) rocks.  So those rocks stuck around my apartment for breakfast food, and the choir got a different cake.  And this recipe fell into disuse, languishing near the rarely-read top half of my "Gluten-free baking" bookmark folder.  Until today, that is, when I realized my folder was longer than my screen, and set to work purging it of bad or unused recipes.  And that is how I once again came across this little gem.

What is hilarious about this recipe is that, when I read the comments, I realized there were about three extraordinarily different versions of the recipe listed. I then took what I liked out of each of those variations and made my own changes, to veganize the recipe and then make it more Christmas-y.  My version is below.  I've split the recipe into a base recipe (if you just want a basic muffin), and my Christmas additions.

Brilliant Basic Brown Rice Muffins 
Dry ingredients:
2 cups brown rice flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp + ~1 tbsp sucanut (or other sweetener of choice)
1 tsp cinnamon

Wet ingredients:
1 flax egg (1 tbsp ground flax seed + 3 tbsp hot water, mixed)
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 tbsp oil (I used canola)
1/2 cup milk + ~2 tbsp (I used almond milk, but any substitution should work)
1/4 cup honey (if you're properly vegan, you can substitute agave, or increase the milk by 1/4 cup and add more sugar/sweetener.  Or for a citrus-y note, add orange juice instead of either the honey or milk and add
some more sugar to compensate)


To Christmasify the recipe, to the dry ingredients I added: ~1/2 tsp nutmeg, ~1/4 cup cloves, and a few pinches each all-spice and cardamom.  To the completed batter, I also added generous amounts of chopped walnuts, raisins (golden + santana), currants, craisins, and chopped candied ginger.

Mix the dry and wet ingredients seperately, then just mix to combine.  Fold in fruit/nuts of choice.  Put in (very well-greased!) muffin tins and bake at 350F for ~25 minutes.  (Mine were done before then, but my oven is notorious for running hot).  LET MUFFINS COOL before removing from tins, otherwise the bottoms will pull out. 

The finished product was delicious - however, I found the spicing (which I was worried would be over-the-top) was actually very subtle.  Next time, I'll definitely increase all of the spices.  Also, the muffins aren't very sweet - the raisins and other fruit help make up for that, but if you're making the base without the fruit I'd recommend more sugar.  And while I'd say any of the fruit is optional, the candied ginger adds a really amazing, delicious holiday flavour and I highly recommend using it.

Happy Christmas eating!