Recipe: Gluten-Free Zucchini Muffins

After finding out about Pamela’s contest at the Georgia National fair, I have been thinking about attending the event and possibly even entering something in the contest. My baking skills leave a lot to be desired so I have no chance of winning anything, but I would just enter something for the fun of it – and to support such a great event.

There was a lone zucchini in the fridge that was on its last leg so I decided on a whim to make gluten-free zucchini muffins. As usual, I searched Food.com for a gluten recipe and then modified it to be gluten-free. I made enough changes to the original recipe to call the new one my own. Though some tweaking could definitely help the muffins out somewhat, they are as good as any zucchini muffins I’ve made to date They’re actually shockingly delicious, but don’t have large crown-like gluten muffins usually do and the texture of the muffins is delicate as well.

Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Zucchini Nut Muffins

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup sugar in the raw (was out of brown sugar)
• 1 heaping cup of grated zucchini
• 1 ½ cup Pamela’s Pancake & Baking Mix flour
• 1/2 t. baking soda
• 1/4 t. baking powder
• 1 t. cinnamon
• ¼ t. ground cloves
• ½ cup chopped walnuts
• ½ cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
• Beat eggs until they are light and foamy.
• Add the sugar, oil, and zucchini.
• Blend well with a sturdy spoon.
• Whisk the dry ingredients together and add to the egg mixture
• Blend wet and dry mixtures well and fold in optional nuts and chocolate chips.
• Spoon into greased muffin tin – filling each one only 2/3 full.
• Bake for approximately 20 minutes or until the toothpick comes out clean.
• Cool muffins in a pan for half an hour and then transfer them to a cooling rack.

The batter yields approximately 15 regular-sized muffins. Normally, I use nutmeg in zucchini muffins and bread, but I used cloves instead just to be different. The recipe I modified called for a lot more cinnamon and no nutmeg or cloves. In the future, I will use brown sugar (instead of sugar in the raw), but I was totally out of it after having bags and bags of it from a 2-for-1 deal at Publix a while back. Using paper liners in the pan would have worked well, but the muffins came out of the pan quite easily without them.

The texture of the muffins was really light, which I liked quite a bit. My husband ate two shortly after they came out of the oven, due to the smell of them driving him nuts as they baked. He said they were some of the best gluten-free muffins I’d ever made and the best zucchini version of anything I’d made, period. I’m rarely impressed with anything I bake unless it’s from a mix where I just follow the directions. But I have to admit, these are some pretty good muffins and I’d gladly serve them to gluten-eaters any day!