I found this recipe many years ago when I started making cranberry pies for festivities and until recently had never made them. Around Thanksgiving as I was already making a cranberry pie and knew I would end up with a surplus of fresh cranberries, so I decided to try these out; I (and everyone else that ate one) am sure glad that I did.
As I have limited kitchen supplies and not many occasions to make muffins, cupcakes, or the like I bought some of those standard foil muffin baking cups so I could make these muffins without investing in the correct pan.
The original recipe is from 1989 from the Wisconsin Cranberry Growers Association and is obviously therefore not GF. However, my general rule of thumb is if a recipe calls for under 2 cups of flour I just substitute a basic GF all purpose blend. For this recipe I used Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Baking Flour (as well as BRM baking soda and powder). If a recipe calls for more than 2 cups of flour I tend to find another substitute gf-oriented version. This general substitution rule has more or less worked out in my handful of baking adventures, but I will keep you posted if one day it turns into some sort of unmitigated disaster, though I suspect it will not.
So this was a very straight forward recipe. You mix in this general order: dry ingredients, butter, wet ingredients, and cranberries. But first you have to cut a lot of fresh cranberries in half. Perhaps time-consuming, but not terribly difficult…
Again because I do not have the proper kitchen tools I used the small side of a cheese grater to zest this orange (which was *gasp* my first independent zesting!) I may have zested too much, but I ended up adding the extra to my cranberry pie for good measure!
I was worried that I had filled them too much, but the recipe said it made 15 muffins and I had 16. (But you know how batter never ends up making the correct amount of cookies/cupcakes/muffins?) I did not want to have to do another batch so I squeezed all of my batter in my 16 muffin cups. But as it turned out they didn’t rise that much more or spill over like I feared.
Becca (who now lives in the same building, life upgrade!) happened to be over my apartment when they came out of the oven and we had a very hard time waiting until they were cool enough to dive in and eat them. “Is it time? Is it time?” The muffins re-energized us enough to continue (or start) our pre-Thanksgiving cooking marathon and made my apartment smell delicious.
Overall, from what I can tell you can’t really tell that they are gluten free and I am confident they would also be delicious in a gluten-full manifestation. All in all, a very delicious recipe that I found delightful enough that I have decided it is now time to invest in a muffin pan so that they can perpetually be in my life.
[addtoany] Yum