Every now and then – or as a matter of fact quite often – I happen to get a strange and incomprehensible inspiration to bake something sweet in the middle of the night. The results are usually ready far after midnight. But why not, especially if you like to work at night.
I haven’t baked cakes or other such delicacies very often, apart from keeping my cinnamon roll stock updated all the time. Cinnamon rolls are my favorite pastries and they are really a part of my daily life! Anyhow, I’m always interested in trying to make new dishes and pastries, and the gluten free diet is forcing me to conceive new recipes.
Now these eureka moments in the middle of the night are always a bit tricky, simply because you can never find all the needed ingredients. I was lucky enough to find all the basic ingredients, but nothing which would add some extra taste except some preserved pineapple.
Well, so I made pineapple muffins. The result was tasty, fresh and worth doing again. They look a bit like circus tents, but that goes well along with the name of my site: Literally translated Ruokasirkusta actually means Food Circus in English.
A gluten free flour mix made of wheat starch is quite easy to find in Finland but I don’t really know how the situation is in other countries. Hopefully you can find some, because there are so many sweet pastries that just call for the aroma of wheat.
PORTION: 12 muffins
TIME TO MAKE: making pastry about 20 minutes, baking about 20-25 minutes
INGREDIENTS:
- 100 g butter
- 2 dl sugar
- ½ dl brown sugar (you can use regular sugar if you haven’t got the brown one)
- 2 eggs
- 1 dl milk
- 4½ dl gluten free wheat starch flour
- ½ dl cocoa powder
- 3 teaspoons of vanilla sugar
- 2 teaspoons of baking powder
- ½ teaspoons of salt
- 8 pineapple rings (4-5 for the pastry, 3 for the topping)
Preheat the oven to 200°C (392°F)
Line the muffin tray thinly with oil or butter or use paper muffin cups.
Cut 4-5 pineapple rings in small pieces and set aside.
Let the butter soften in room temperature in a medium big bowl. In the meantime stir together the flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla sugar and cocoa powder in another bowl.
When the butter is soft enough, add sugar, brown sugar, eggs and milk. Mix well. You don’t need a blender nor even a whisk, I blended the whole thing with a cooking fork.
Then add the flour mixture little by little into the bowl containing the butter blend, still mixing all the time.
Finally add the pineapple pieces and mix in very quickly.
Fill the muffin cases two-thirds and then decorate the muffins with three or four pieces of pineapple. Bake for about 20-25 minutes. After 20 minutes test to see if they are ready with a wooden stick. If the stick stays dry the muffins are ready – there is no need to keep them too long in the oven, because the result can easily become too dry.
(NOTE: With at least one of my batches using paper cups a few of them overflowed. You might want to consider using some kind of teflon or silicon cups to avoid this)
Tags: chocolate muffins pineapple muffins muffin
Ruokasirkusta 