The Weekly Muffin: Gluten Free Coconut Pineapple Walnut Muffins

Last night, the Baker suggested I wrote a cookbook about all my muffins I have been baking up. He suggested the title “Muffin Top”. I laughed, though it might be appropriate since these muffins are so good it is hard to keep your hands off them. Makes you want to eat muffins post-run, for snack, for dessert (and maybe every meal in between). They are healthy, but if you started a 3 muffin a day habit, might not go so well. Which is why I love being able to share my experiments with my early morning Thursday trail run crew.

I have started a list of all the possible combinations I want to try. It makes me really excited.

At this point, I feel like I am working on two projects. One is to create a whole host of creative combinations of muffins. And two is to perfect the muffin mixture itself. That means, I am really looking for the perfect base. Things I could universally change about them all to make them each individually better. One of the things that I discovered with this batch was that the addition of a teaspoon of baking powder makes a huge difference. I am eager to go back and work on the other flavors I have already done to see what a difference it makes. It’s amazing how something so small and subtle can make such a huge difference.

Each week, I build on the previous week and each week am rewarded by the evolution of the muffin. This combination of ingredients absolutely shined. Not only in terms of the flavor profile, but texturally. They were incredibly light with splashes of texture from the mixed in shredded coconut, bits of pineapple and walnut. The strongest, yet not overpowering flavor was pineapple, the coconut was very subtle. They reminded me of pineapple upside down cake.

One of my friends thanked me for the cupcakes. Naturally, I got indignant and thought, “these are not cupcakes! No, these are muffins!” But as soon as I thought about it, I wondered. What really is the difference between a muffin and a cupcake. Does it really just come down to frosting? Yes, no and maybe. If you were to throw frosting on these babies and present them to someone as a cupcake, they would not bat an eye. There are differences in the amount of flour used in a normal muffin vs. normal cupcake (normal meaning Gluten) and that is about it, with cupcakes having less. Bake time and temperature is also different.

I tend to think that the type of muffins I desire are very different than the type of cupcakes. While a banana ginger muffin sounds great, a banana ginger cupcake sounds odd. If I am going to include chocolate in the game, I would never lie to myself and say there is ANY difference between a chocolate muffin vs. chocolate cupcake except the frosting. You don’t get back much in the way of health benefits on that just by calling it something different.

I basically feel that muffins and cupcakes are on a related spectrum and they can be more closely related or not depending on what is included in each. And frosting, frosting I think is the biggest delineation between the two. Whatever their differences, these muffins were delicious and brought up the idea of a pineapple upside down cake, without having to sacrifice its healthiness and heartiness that you want out of a good muffin at breakfast.

Gluten Free Coconut Pineapple Walnut Muffins

Ingredients

1 can pineapple chunks or crushed
½ cup almond milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
¼ cup butter
½ cup light brown sugar
½ cup dark brown sugar
1 ⅓ cups brown rice flour
⅔ cups garbanzo bean flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp lime zest
¼ cup shredded coconut, plus more for sprinkling
¼ cup walnuts, finely chopped

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 and line with parchment cups/grease 2 muffin pans (12 muffins). In a food processor, mix together the pineapple, almond milk and butter. Mix in the two types of brown sugar and vanilla and mix until incorporated.

In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients including the 1/4 cup shredded coconut and 1/4 cup finely chopped walnuts until incorporated. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and stir to combine.

Scoop about 1/4 cup of muffin mix into the muffin pans, making 9-12 muffins. Sprinkle the muffins with shredded coconut and bake until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted, about 25-27 minutes.

* I was thinking an interesting substitute would be coconut oil instead of butter. Not tested, but probably would work excellent.