Free Fridays! GINGER!

I'm so excited about today's free Friday. So, the secret ingredient is ginger! Super exciting! Wait... how are you not excited about ginger? It's only one of the most ugly plants out there - the edible part anyway. Like a potato, you wonder who was the person who thought it was a great idea to eat this in the first place. Well, I'm sure you've seen ginger used in Asian dishes, teas, cookies and holiday breads. I used ginger in the first recipe ever posted to this blog.

A few years ago, before I found I had celiac, I was pregnant at Christmas and craving orange ginger. I set out to find the perfect thing for that craving and came up with an amazing orange ginger cookie, that I actually packaged and sent as Christmas presents that year. They were crispy, hot with sweet orange frosting and everyone loved them. I missed that flavor, it was one of my favorites. Something about the hot sweet spicy, really made them unique and fun. So, of course, I wanted to try to replicate it. Today, I'm going to show you this recipe, which was originally my best attempt at a ginger cookie - and completely failed. When dealing with high protein flours, most of the time, crispy isn't the description of the end product. Unless you've burned it to said crisp. I've made cookies that are the consistency of cakes, coconut flours are like corn breads, and it's a work in progress for me, even though after a few days of internet searches, I find that there are lots of well versed people out there writing GF blogs that are very knowledgeable. I have not used anything today from their sites and certainly reference them when or if I do.

I took the failed cookie recipe and realized this would make such an amazing breakfast bread. I've not baked it as a loaf yet, but just in cupcakes. You can do 2 things with these: 1: bake them and eat them as they are or frosted, or 2: bake them, hollow them out and fill them then frost them and eat them. Either way they can be refrigerated in an airtight container until you're ready to use them. I found the flavor was amazing 2-4 days out from originally baking them. Filling them is a bit time consuming, so for all practical purposes, the recipe will just frost them. They are healthy, full of protein, and calcium and can be a great sugar free way to start a fast paced morning. Or to pair with a slow paced afternoon tea!

Note: today, since some of the measurements are so tiny, the scale does not register them - I do not find this to be an issue, because I'm the type to know if I need a few dashes of something it's not the end of a recipe if it's 3 dashes or 5. This applies mostly to using spices. It's a flavor issue. However, for reproduction sake, I did use tiny measure spoons (1/4 teaspoon) which, I listed first in the recipe, then switch to the scale. Remember to zero out before adding anything else!

Ginger Breakfast Muffins

1/8 tsp salt (basically 2 pinches)

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp white pepper

8 oz almond flour

1/8 - 1/4 oz of cinnamon

1/8 oz cloves

1/4 oz of flax seed

1/3 oz NuNaturals stevia

3 oz sugar free maple syrup

2 oz unsalted butter

5 oz shredded fresh ginger

1/4 oz vanilla

1 egg

Preheat oven to 350f. Line regular muffin tin with muffin cups. Mix almond flour and all dry ingredients, including spices, together in a bowl. Blend in wet ingredients. Fill muffin cups almost to full and bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Watch them. Depending on your oven it may require a little more or less time. They should be a warm brown on top.

Allow to cool. Frost and eat or refrigerate for later.

Frosting can be found: Here!