Sweet of the Week #30i, Wild Rice Blueberry Muffins

This week’s Sweet is a blueberry muffin made with wild rice.  It’s gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free, vegan, free of refined sugar and has only a tiny bit of oil.  It is full of natural sweetness and packed with flavor.  It still amazes me how much of the “bad” stuff can be removed from a recipe and still produce such a great Sweet! 

About this week’s Ingredient…It has been within the last year that I discovered wild rice.  A recipe in the Crazy Sexy Diet book by Kris Carr called for wild rice, so I went looking.  I found out it is not actually a rice, but a grass.  Wild rice is also called water oats and Indian rice. Most of the wild rice I have seen in the grocery store comes from Minnesota.  I had no idea!

Trader Joes has a pre-cooked Wild Rice packet, which is super helpful for me, as traditional wild rice takes about an hour to cook.  I used pre-cooked in this recipe, however you could also cook up your own if you’ve got some spare time or don’t mind heating your house up cooking on your stovetop.  It’s nearly too hot to bake here right now and stovetop cooking is pretty much off limits here, so pre-cooked it is!

If you are familiar with the flavor of wild rice, you’ll notice it in this recipe.  If you are not familiar with wild rice, you may not notice it in these muffins at all. It doesn’t even stand out much in the cooked muffins, it blends in nicely with the blueberries.   I love the little punch of protein wild rice adds to the muffins!

This week’s recipe is a modification of this recipe from CookEatShare.  I am not very familiar with this website.  According to their information page, it is not operated by a real person and all of the recipes shown on the site are from copyright-free sources.  Some recipes on this site were credited to real people, this one was not.  Should you know of the real person who created the recipe from which I started developing my own variation, please let me know.  I’d love to give them credit here!

Wild Rice Blueberry Muffins
(Makes 15)

1 cup of my favorite gluten-free flour blend
1/2 cup cornstarch
1 T. baking powder
1/4 t. salt

2 T. flax meal mixed with 6 T. hot water (this is a slurry to replace 2 eggs)
4 oz. unsweetened applesauce (this is one snack size cup of applesauce)
1 T. oil (I used grapeseed)
1 cup unsweetened almond milk
1 cup cooked wild rice
3 T. maple syrup
1 cup fresh blueberries

Heat oven to 425 degrees. (I know this is h-o-t for a muffin, it works!)

Whisk dry ingredients together in bowl and set aside.

In bowl of stand mixer, combine flax meal slurry, applesauce, oil and almond milk.  Add wild rice and maple syrup.  Slowly add in dry ingredients, mixing only low until a thin batter forms.  Add in one cup of blueberries, stirring gently by hand.

This post is linked to The Whole Gang’s Friday  Foodie Secret Ingredient Blueberry event.