Apple Cinnamon Muffins {GAPS-style}

I don't care how "healthy" I strive to be, I can't shake my love for baked goodies. There's just something about biting into a warm, buttered, baked yummy...it fills voids in my hungry soul and makes me feel all cozy inside. Pair it with a cold mug of raw milk, and I'm ready to die and go to heaven. Salads and soup and fried eggs and squash fries are all great, but nothing compares to the goodness of a buttered carbohydrate melting in my mouth.

Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my mouth.

The GAPS Diet is not very conducive to buttered carb-eating. Butter? Yes. Crusty baguettes? No. Warm blueberry muffins? Nada. Fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies? Sorry.

But I'm a fighter, and where there's a will there's also a way. Come hell or high water, I'll find that way if it exists. 

I scoured the internet from top to bottom, Googled every keyword I could think of, and read more blogs than I care to admit to find the perfect, most "normal" muffin recipe I could. When my endeavors proved unsuccessful--they were all either too mushy, too dry, too coconut-y, or worse, the recipe made just six muffins--I found a way. I made my own recipe.

What I love about this recipe is that the muffins come out as close as I could possibly get them to "regular" muffins made with white flour. They're springy and moist, not hard like hockey pucks. They don't have the airy-ness of a white flour muffin, but then again, does anything but white flour give baked goods that texture. That would be a big, fat NO. I also love that I created this recipe to make more than six muffins. Every recipe I found before called for tons of eggs (which aren't cheap when you buy 'em like I do) and made six to eight muffins. Seriously?! That might work if children weren't in my equation.

I have discovered lately that I really enjoy baking with coconut flour. You use less, it's more dense, and you can eat less because it fills you up faster.

So, here's my recipe for GAPS-friendly Apple Cinnamon Muffins. It makes three dozen--that's 36, not 6--muffins. I also use flax seed meal and water to replace some of the eggs, so it's less expensive.

What you need:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line your muffin tin.

5 Tbsp. flax seed meal
1 cup filtered water
5 eggs, preferably pastured
3 cups applesauce (I make my own, but storebought applesauce with no sugar would also be fine.)
1 1/2 cups coconut flour
1/3 cup coconut oil, melted
1/4 cup butter, melted
4 Tbsp. honey
3 Tbsp. cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. sea salt, fine not coarse
1/2 tsp. allspice

First, in a bowl combine the flax seed meal and water and stir well. Set aside.

Next, add the remaining ingredients into a large bowl and mix well. You don't have to worry about over-mixing with coconut flour! When the flax seed meal mixture is gummy, add it to the bowl and continue to mix until well blended.

Here's what the "batter" should look like:


It's more like cookie dough than muffin batter, so no worries!

Now you're ready to scoop it into your muffin tins. I used my cookie dough scoop for two reasons. One, each muffin would be exactly the same size and I would know exactly how many muffins my recipe would make. Two, because the batter is so thick, this is much easier than using my finger to scrape batter off a spoon.




I did two scoops per muffin.

 

Last, use the back of a spoon to press the batter down into the muffin cups.

Bake 17-18 minutes.

Helpful hints:

• Don't be alarmed if the muffins don't rise much during baking. Mine didn't either.
• Rather than using a toothpick to check for done-ness, press your finger lightly on the middle of the muffin. If it's still really moist or gooey, let them bake another minute or two.
• Store in an airtight container on the countertop for up to two days, then refrigerate. These will grow mold if left out too long!
• These muffins are not super sweet. We have lost our taste for really sweet things since being on GAPS. If you prefer more sweetness, adjust the honey accordingly.
• If you don't have flax seed meal or prefer not to bake with it, just substitute 6 more eggs in place of the flax seed meal/water mixture.
• Spread generously with pastured butter when they're hot out of the oven and remember what it was like to eat "normal" baked goodies.

Let me know how they turn out if you try them! I can tell you that we are enjoying the heck out of these little babies!

*This post was shared at Monday Mania. and Real Food Wednesday.