Corn Muffins

I've dreamed about southern USA skillet cornbread, but never come across a recipe which screamed BAKE ME! I don't have a skillet for a start...

This weekend we had a roast chook, and I threw the bones and sundries into a pot and made some chicken and vege soup. Included some home grown celery - very proud of that!

Anyway to get to the point, to make this into a meal for dinner, it needed a bit of suport in the carbohydrate department. I started by adding a tin of cannelini beans to the soup, but my genius moment was corn muffins.


1 cup cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose gluten free baking mix
1/3 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup canola oil
1 cup rice milk

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C. Grease muffin pan or use those floppy silicone ones like me.
In a large bowl, mix everything together, and stir gently until just combined. Spoon batter into prepared muffin cups.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into a muffin comes out clean.

The key with muffins is to work fast, and mix only as much as you have to - not a single mix more! If you see the odd bit of unmixed flour, just stir this little area a bit until it is wet, and go with it. It will turn out ok I promise!

Next time I would use a little less sugar, and maybe a pinch of cayenne pepper. Josh said he loved them, they tasted just how he remembered corn bread.

Bread - better than any I have been able to buy

My local supermarket isn't really big on providing a wide selection, but I used to be able to get GFDF bread most times I went shopping. Since then a local bread maker, Burgen, have introduced a GF range. Great! Not great, as every flavour contains milk. Since this big brand is now covering off the GF department, Countdown no longer stocks the other GF breads which were also DF. Long story short I needed to get sorted with a decent recipe to make my own.

Thanks for this one go to my Mother in Law Mary! Recipe is for your breadmaker, though I'm sure you could do it in a loaf tin in the oven.

400ml Warm water
2 tsp dry yeast (I use the Edmonds active yeast in the jar)
3 tab sugar

Place in a bowl and set aside to get the yeast going.

In another bigger bowl place:

2 1/4c White rice flour
1c Brown rice flour
1 1/2 tab Xanthan gum
1 tab salt (yes sounds like a lot but I think it is important as changes how the yeast behaves?)
3 tab milk powder (I use coconut milk powder)

Stir together. Check the yeast mix, by now should be frothy on top. Give it a stir then add to it:

3 tab oil
3 eggs
1 tab vinegar

Pour the wet into the dry, mix it up and place into your bread machine, the machine will try to knead it so don't worry if you haven't mixed it very well. Will look like a freaky pancake batter at this point - don't worry!
Med Crust, I think I use the 750g setting, takes 3 hours.

Make sure you are there to take it out as soon as it is cooked or it will collapse and you will have a very wet loaf which goes moldy quickly.

Variations:

Great results have been with replacing the white rice flour with fine ground cornmeal, or with buckwheat flour. I've used the healtheries brand cornmeal from New World/Countdown etc, and get my buckwheat flour from the organics shop.

You can make this a fruit bread by adding 3 tsp spice (mix of cinnamon, nutmeg etc) to the flours and 2/3c sultanas.
Let me know what other ideas you come up with!

 

I ate that slice still hot with homemade blueberry jam. I even picked the blueberries!