Cooking ≠ Baking

As I continue my journey to mastering gluten-free cooking, I decided to venture into the world of baked goods. Specifically, I was trying to learn how to cook muffins, banana bread, and other quick goodies that I can grab to eat on the go. Since they are fairly expensive, hard to find in stores, and not very tasty, I thought – why not just bake some from scratch?

Well let me tell you… baking is MUCH tougher than cooking. I thought my recipes have gone fairly well over the past few weeks. I have made stirfrys (and lots of them, now that I have found these delicious rice noodles), pastas, burgers (homemade patties with gluten-free buns), chili, and much more. I was on a roll… or so I thought until I made these muffins.

Photographed on March 4/17

Since breakfast has always been a struggle for me, I decided my first 'on the go' food I would make would be muffins. After researching a few recipes, I decided to follow the recipe posted on Cooking Classy, a blog I follow. Specifically, this was a recipe to make 12 gluten-free banana chocolate chips muffins, which would last me weeks (I would freeze them of course) and use up the bananas I already have that were going bad. The only ingredients I really had to buy for this recipe was the gluten-free flour blend (Red Mill – Walmart – approx. 5$) and some Xanthan gum. The rest I already had, which made this an affordable go-to breakfast idea, especially with my busy schedule.

Photographed on March 3/17

All was going well… I was followed the recipe very diligently and timed the baking time to the exact minute. However, when I took them out of the oven I was shocked – they were extremely flat… and extremely burnt. They also crumbled apart as I tried to eat it, because it was very dry. This was somewhat expected, since I was cooking without gluten – the ingredient that allows food to stick and ‘fluff’ up. However, I did not expect them to be as flat, dense, and dry as they were.

This experience taught me two things – 1) never expected your life to be as perfect and easy as Pinterest and blogs make it seem… and 2) mistakes do, and WILL happen. Needless to say, it’s back to the drawing board for me. I plan to do some more research, to see what adjustments I can make to this recipe, in order to perfect (or at least tackle) the art of muffin-making. If all goes well, my next challenge is to make these cereal bars and banana bread I also found on Pinterest, another great breakfast food that I can bring on the go. Wish me luck!