Lavender-Quinoa-Almond Muffins

I finished the liver cleanse, and realized that a) I felt much better without eating flour (i.e. gluten), and b) I didn't miss dairy products at all. (More on this in a later post). So, in a natural enthousiasm to bake something after a three-week hiatus, I experimented around, in a chain-of-thought style.

I knew I had quinoa leftovers, the pot of dried Croatian lavender literally jumped out of the (packed) pantry as I opened it, and the best replacement for regular flour is almond flour (in my opinion). I remembered Mollie Katzen's excellent wild rice-quinoa muffin recipe. Some googling (here and here) and head-scratching later, this adapted recipe took form.


Ingredients

DRY:
2 cups quinoa (cooked)
2 cups almond flour
3/4 cups of sugar--the night before, in a glass jar, mix the (organic white cane) sugar with 2 Tablespoons of lavender flour, let sit, closed, for about 24hrs
1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

WET:
3/4 cup almond milk
1 egg
1 tsp almond extract
1/4 cup safflower oil

Procedure

The usual: whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients in a small bowl. Poor the wet mix into the dry ingredients, combine without overmixing. Bake 25-30 min at 350F.

Verdict

They smell fantastic. Without an overpowering smell, they don't taste bitter at all, adding the flowers in the batter was the way to go. Maybe, next time I'll grind them first, but they were as innocuous as if I'd added thyme. The nuttiness flavour brought by the almond flour and the quinoa played second fiddle to the lavender, exactly as I had hoped. The only thing was that they were very crumbly, I actually had trouble getting them out of the baking pan--next time, muffin cups (paper). Also, next time, I'll have to think of a way to limit the sugar--tricky, since too much lavender can bring a bitter flavour (as I learned from infusing milk with lavender a little while back...). Of course now I'm thinking of infusing stevia extract with lavender.