Chocolate Zucchini Muffins (GF, DF)

Well hello friends! It's been awhile since I've posted on the blog.  This summer our family was blessed to welcome our third little girl into our tribe.  She's been so sweet and snuggly and I am just soaking up all that snuggly goodness.  Not to mention the nine months preceding her birth were quite a whirlwind of an experience.  I was so sick for the majority of my pregnancy and one of the last things on my mind was creative cooking or really cooking at all. Now I feel like we are settling into a rhythm and all of a sudden I have my love of cooking returning.

I have been neglecting the actual blog a bit, but I tend to post more on the Pint Sized Foodies Facebook page because I can post from my phone while I am in the cooking process.  So if you haven't already please like Pint Sized Foodies on Facebook.

I want to share with you a muffin recipe I made this weekend that was a hit around our house. I must admit that I ate several of these today. They were just so good.  I actually made these muffins to leave in a freezer at my daughter's school for a dairy free treat on a "birthday treat" day.  That is if we have any left in a couple days!

Chocolate Zucchini Muffins

 2 1/2 cups GF flour [I used a mix of sorghum, tapioca, oat, and buckwheat]
 1/4 cup cocoa
 3/4 cup coconut sugar [or other sugar option]
 2 tsp baking powder
 1 tsp baking soda
 1/2 tsp sea salt
 
2 chia eggs [1 TBS Chia seed to 3TBS water=1 chia egg]

1/2 cup coconut oil
1 cup non-dairy milk

1 cup shredded zucchini
1/2 cup chocolate chips



Mix all dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately. Add the two mixes together. Fold in zucchini and chocolate chips.  Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes.  Enjoy!

***A few extra thoughts......

*Regular wheat flour can be used if you aren't concerned with Gluten Free
*Other granulated sugar can be used.  I rarely use any granulated sugar but when I do I like to use coconut sugar. 
*Eggs can be used instead of chia eggs
*I like the Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips b/c they are dairy free

Millet Muffins

This is a great, easy muffin recipe that contains a fabulous amount of protein.  I love to take existing recipes and give them a turn or a twist and invent something new.  This is what happened to this recipe.  A friend gave me a recipe a few months ago and I tweeked it to come up with a egg-free, gluten-free muffin.  These are a great snack and hold together well to take them out and about.


Millet Muffins

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups flour (I mixed Rice Flour, Buckwheat Flour, Tapioca flour) (or Whole Wheat)
1/3 cup raw millet
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 cup plain dairy free yogurt
2 TBS ground chia seeds mixed with 6 TBS water (substitute for 2 eggs)
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup raw honey (or pure maple syrup)
2 TBS juice from 1 lemon
Grated zest from 1 lemon

Directions

Preheat oven to 375.  Line a 12 cup muffin pan.

Whisk together the flour, millet, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  In a separate bowl mix together the yogurt, chia seed mixture, coconut oil, honey, lemon juice, and lemon zest.

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients.  Stir until flour is just combined. Divide batter into muffin cups.  Fill cups just below rim.

Bake for about 15 minutes until tops are just browning and beginning to crack.

Cranberry-Orange Muffins (Vegan & GF)

My girls love muffins.  They don't care what kind. They just love muffins. I don't think they've ever said no to one. It's become kind of funny.  I think it stems from the fact that we just don't have a lot of baked goods or sweet treats around the house.  I've never been a huge fan of baking.  It's not necessarily my culinary gift.  My love in the kitchen is cooking.  I get real excited about using whole foods to create healthy, simple dishes.  So I think part of the love my girls have for muffins is that "mom's finally made a baked good!"  Happy day for them!

We have  a group of dear friends we meet with weekly in what we call a house church.  We get together. We share life.  We share a meal. Our kids play, fight, cry, giggle, and love on each other.  All the while we share our hearts with each other and try to be people that love on and encourage and support one another.  It's a beautiful thing.  In our little house church pod there are several who have gone gluten free over the years so it's been a natural progression for me to learn to make things in a way that is available for all to eat. Even though I'm not a huge fan of baking I've ventured off into a bit of gluten free baking.  It's a fun new challenge, and I am always up for a new adventure. 

On top of playing around with my gluten free baking, I've been experimenting and totally in love with fresh cranberries.  Oh my word.  I just can't get enough of this tasty little fruit.  I love tossing dried cranberries into salads but have yet to find any dried cranberries without sugar.  Not that it's the end of the world to have some sugar but I like to minimize our families consumption of sugar, especially in the winter with all the colds and flu.  This year I've become a big fan of fresh cranberries.  I bought a bunch this fall at the farmers market, rinsed them, and tossed them into bags and froze them.  Perfect.  I've done cookies, smoothies, teas, muffins, breads, and juices.  Did you know cranberries are believed to help protect against urinary tract infections? According to the Ayurvedic tradition, cranberries are the lymph-movers of the winter season.  They lymphatic system drains the cells and transports the immune system.   It's not a surprise then that cranberries have a global effect on the body's well-being, meaning better lymph drainage equals better overall health.  A couple other benefits John Douillard states that cranberries offer is that they aid in strengthening the gums, protect against the common cold, boost heart health, and protect the prostate.  I say these little berries pack a punch!

Cranberry-Orange Muffins


1 cup (1/3 each of sweet sorghum, buckwheat, & tapicoa flours)(regular flour is always an option)
3/4 cup oats
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp sea salt
3 TBS ground flaxseeds
1 TBS ground chia seeds
3 TBS raw honey, maple syrup, or brown rice syrup
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup applesauce (unsweetened)
1/2 cup non-dairy milk


juice of 1 orange
zest of 1 orange
3/4 cup chopped pecans, walnuts, or almonds
1 cup chopped fresh cranberries

Mix flour, oats, baking powder, baking soda, and sea salt together in one bowl.

Mix flax seeds, chia seeds, oil, applesauce, milk, sweetener, orange zest, and the juice of 1 orange together in separate bowl.

Combine the wet and dry mixtures.  Fold in nuts and cranberries.

Pour into muffin tins.  (FYI---reusable muffin cups make an awesome little Christmas gift!)

Bake at 350 for 18-20 minutes. 

Enjoy some vegan, granulated sugar-free, gluten-free muffins!  :)

Have a beautiful Christmas!

Grace & Peace to you!!

Vegan Strawberry Rhubarb Muffins

It's strawberry season.  Glorious Michigan strawberry season! We love strawberries around our house.  In fact, this week we headed out to a great little no-spray strawberry farm and picked 60 pounds of strawberries.  Yes 60 pounds! My mom was here visiting and more than willing to help.  Despite my two little girls who just grazed all over the strawberry patch and out of our baskets, we still ended up with 60 pounds.  I was a little shocked.  My intention had been to pick "a lot" but 60 pounds. Whoa! My mom took about 10 pounds or so home and the rest she left with us.  I was worried that I'd gotten a little to ambitious but lo and behold I quickly froze them and now I have lots of bags of beautifully frozen berries stocked away in our deep freeze to use over the next year.

A little tip if your planning on freezing your berries whole.  Wash berries and lay them out on a cooking sheet in a single layer.  Put cookie sheet in freezer for a few hours.  When berries are frozen take the cookie sheet out and put berries in a freezer bag or container.  Freezing berries this way makes it easy to freeze them quickly and whole and they won't stick together.  During the year you can toss them in smoothies, ice creams, or thaw them and use however you wish.

The other day was a cool, rainy day here in Grand Rapids, so our little family decided to stay inside in our P.J.'s all day and play and rest.  It was fantastic.  Norah loves helping me in the kitchen so we played around with making a few things in the kitchen, and because we still have lots of fresh strawberries I was on a quest to find a little sweet treat for us to make.  We'd made a Strawberry Rhubarb crisp the week before and it was so delicious.  In fact, I'm totally hooked on the strawberry rhubarb combo.  So Norah and I decided to come up with a muffin recipe that combined these two flavors.  It's fun to create with a little helper.  She will sometimes want to add a little more of this or that or taste our concoction to make sure it's tasting good.  I love it!

So we played around a bit and came up with a yummy muffin recipe.  They are vegan but not gluten free.  Baking isn't my love and I don't do it often.   So I haven't experimented a whole lot with gluten free baking.  Our family consumes such small amounts of wheat and we've never had any issues.  I do however, buy any wheat that we'll use organic because wheat is such a huge genetically modified crop these days, which is probably one of the reasons gluten intolerances are on the rise.  So all that said if your gluten intolerant perhaps you could just substitute a gluten free all purpose flour??  It's fun to experiment and create and get the kiddos involved.  So I hope you enjoy these tasty little treats!

 


Vegan Strawberry Rhubarb Muffins

1 cup non-dairy milk

1 tsp. apple cider vinegar

1/3 cup sucanat (unprocessed sugar cane juice--I used this instead of regular sugar)

½ cup applesauce

¼ cup oil

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 ½ cup whole wheat pastry flour

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

¾ tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. salt

1 cup finely chopped rhubarb

1 cup chopped strawberries

¼ cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven 375.  Mix milk and vinegar together.   Let set while you mix flours, baking soda & powder, cinnamon, and salt.  

Add sucanat, applesauce, oil, and vanilla to milk mixture.
 

 Mix rhubarb and strawberries into flour mixture.

Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir until combined.

Pour into greased muffin tins.  Bake 20-25 minutes or until toothpick inserted into middle comes out clean.

This made 18 muffins