Black and Blue Muffins...Gluten Free Heaven

I was saving this recipe for the monthly recipe poll on the sidebar over there, but I love it so much I am making an executive decision to post it now. First of all, let me reiterate that I have had so much failure in the kitchen when making up recipes it's enough to make me want to throw away all the pots and pans and just eat Carl's Jr. for the rest of my life. Someday I'll write a post about all the dishes that never made it into the blog and all the terrible incarnations of my favorite dishes that were too awful to eat more than three bites of. But for today, after much experimentation and trial and error, I bring you Black and Blue Muffins.

The reason this was so difficult for me is that I wanted to do my own mixture of different flours and not use a prepackaged baking mix. By the way, there's a reason they have those pre-made mixes at the store. Flour proportioning is tough to do!I was going for a whole-grain texture with these muffins, and I knew I wanted to use buckwheat so people would know that buckwheat is, in fact, gluten free. However, buckwheat and I are not best friends. I rarely use it and I have found out that it is very absorbent. But if you use it in the right proportion, you can have a great product. Too much buckwheat makes your muffins taste like sticks. I also wanted to use teff flour because teff is such a great grain. It has a lot more protein and bran per ounce than regular flour because the grains are so small they just use the entire grain to mill the flour and you get more of the good stuff. (I'm not so great with the technicalities of alternative grains, I just know it's a little healthier to use.) I must say, the finished product is so good, they should start making it at Starbucks to replace that gluten free one that they took off the market a little bit ago. Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself, here. Give this recipe a try and let me know what you think about it. I hope you like it.

Gluten Free Black and Blue Muffins

1/2 cup blended oats (I use Blue Chip Group GF oats)

1/2 cup buckwheat flour

1/2 cup teff flour

1/4 cup tapioca flour

1/3 cup sugar

3 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

3/4 cup milk

1 egg

1/2 cup sour cream

zest of 1 lemon

juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 of a 6 ounce package of blueberries

1/2 of a 6 ounce package of blackberries, halved

1/2 cup Grandpa's Kitchen baking flour blend

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 T soft butter

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line 12 muffin tins with paper liners. In a large mixing bowl, blend flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl, mix milk, egg, sour cream, lemon zest and lemon juice until egg is beaten. Make a well in dry ingredients, add wet ingredients all at once. Fold in berries. In another bowl, mix Grandpa's Kitchen flour and brown sugar and butter with a pastry cutter until it resembles coarse meal. Fill muffin cups almost to the top and sprinkle sugar mixture over batter. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from muffin tin immediately after coming out of the oven and cool on wire racks to prevent sticking to paper liners. Freezes well.

Happy eating!