It all started with a book my five year old brought home from school, a modern day version of Little Red Riding Hood “a new fangled prairie tale”, in my opinion, a truly terrible version of a classic, but it ended with grandma opening a muffin shop for the wolf to work in to keep him busy enough to stop terrorizing the neighborhood AND a recipe for Wheat Berry Muffins.  Upon first reading I assumed it was muffins made with wheatberries, which as much as I love wheatberries, did not sound so tasty to me mixed into a muffin. But, then I realized it was whole wheat muffins with blueberries and “grandma’s” secret ingredient, sunflower seeds, now that didn’t sound too bad.  Evan asked for days to make the Wheat Berry Muffins, but I had an open carton of buttermilk in the fridge that needed a purpose, so I decided Little Red’s grandma’s recipe needed some tweaking and the more I thought about it, I realized how yummy corn muffins are with berries and why not just for fun try to make a gluten free version….hmmm, now I was on to something.  So I spent the morning scouring through recipes and ended up with four different ones I took a little from this one, a little from that one and so on until I came up with the tastiest little morsels, moist and delicious. There’s a hint of coconut, but not overwhelmingly so (in fact, Skyler, who despises all things coconut, upon tasting these for the first time, exclaimed “delicious” and then asked “is there coconut in these?” and then continued to devour the rest and ask for more), a really nice crunch from the coarse cornmeal and a bit of texture from the sunflower seeds, lightly sweet, unbelievably moist and so very yummy.  These little gems are my current muffin obsession.

Corn Berry Muffins

Author: Sweet Green Kitchen’s Jen Jones

Makes about 15 muffins or 12 plus 12 minis

Ingredients:

1 cup Brown Rice Flour

1/2 cup Coarse Cornmeal **

1/2 cup Almond Flour

3/4 cup Granulated Natural Cane Sugar

1 Tablespoon Baking Powder

3/4 teaspoon Salt

1 cup Buttermilk

2 extra large Eggs

1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract

1/2 teaspoon Almond Extract

1/3 cup Coconut Oil – liquefied ***

1 – 1 1/2 cups Blueberries (or Blackberries) – about 1 -2 6 ounce containers of berries

1/4 cup Sunflower Seeds

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In a large bowl, add in all the dry ingredients; Brown Rice flour, Cornmeal, Almond flour, Sugar, Baking Powder and Salt.  Whisk together to combine.

In a small bowl or liquid measuring cup, add in the Buttermilk, Eggs, Vanilla and Almond Extract.  Stir thoroughly to combine.

Add the liquids to the dry ingredients and stir to fully combine.  Mix in the Coconut Oil.

Gently stir in the Blueberries and Sunflower Seeds.

Prepare muffin tins with cooking spray.  Pour in about ¼ cup of batter into each muffin cup.

Bake at 350 F, about 20-23 minutes for regular size muffins or 16-18 minutes for minis.

Recipe Notes: As an alternative to Blueberries these muffins are also delicious with big juicy Blackberries.  I actually really like making mini muffins with 1 big Blackberry in each one. 

**A note on Cornmeal – the cornmeal adds a nice little crunch to these muffins that I just adore.  Alternatively, you could use finer corn flour, but you’d lose out on the crunch.  I have also used corn flour with a few tablespoons of the ½ cup subbed out with polenta or corn grits.

***One other note, if Coconut Oil is not available, I think your best bet on substitution would be butter, but I would probably up it to 1/2 cup.

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Tagged: Almond Flour, Blackberries, blueberries, Brown Rice Flour, cornmeal, Gluten Free