Blueberry muffins

(Note: added ingredients for 2.5:1 ratio on 7/15/2019)

I'm feeling pretty damn proud of myself right now. It's all well and good adapting traditional cooking recipes to be keto-friendly, but adapting baking recipes is a whole other ball of wax. Baking, of course, is chemistry, and the amount of any given ingredient and its properties is critical to making things happen properly. There are a lot of resources out there for converting recipes to be gluten-free, but almost all of them use nut flours, which aren't an option for us. M doesn't love the taste or texture of coconut flour, and there's no (to me) obvious way to convert to KetoCuisine. So adapting baked goods is tough.

On the left, using the traditional recipe. On the right, my (finally!) successful attempt at the keto version.

My favorite blueberry muffin recipe is this one from Smitten Kitchen. Since the traditional recipe uses a lot of fat (butter and yogurt or sour cream), I thought I might try to adapt it for M. My first attempt, I used all KetoCuisine in lieu of the flour and messed around with some of the other ingredients, not fully appreciating how little I understood how the chemistry of KetoCuisine compared to wheat flour. I ended up with an overly sweet gummy mess. I dumped the whole batch.

This time around, I used a little bit of coconut flour, doubled the baking powder, doubled the egg, and added psyllium husk as a binder, and voila! Completely acceptable muffins at M's new 2:1 ratio.

Not a gummy mess!

Ingredients for 12 muffins of 190 calories each at 2:1:

140g KetoCuisine baking mix

50g coconut flour

20g powdered psyllium husk

70g butter

175g full-fat sour cream

100g egg (raw, mixed well)

20g baking powder

5g baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

30g Truvia sweetener

2-3g lemon zest

200g fresh blueberries

Ingredients for 12 muffins of 210 calories each at 2.5:1:

140g KetoCuisine baking mix

50g coconut flour

20g psyllium husk powder

60g butter

10g ghee

175g creme fraiche

90g egg (raw, mixed well)

20g baking powder

5g baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

30g Truvia sweetener

2-3g lemon zest

150g fresh blueberries

Directions:

Heat oven to 375 deg F and line a muffin tin with liners. Melt butter in a bowl and add egg, sour cream or creme fraiche, lemon zest, and sweetener. Whisk together until smooth, then add the baking powder, baking soda, and salt and mix again. In a separate bowl combine the coconut flour, KetoCuisine, and psyllium husk. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients a little bit at a time, folding it in with a large spatula. Once all the flour mix is incorporated, add the blueberries, again folding it with a spatula until they are evenly distributed. At this point, the batter should be thick almost like chocolate chip cookie dough.

Divide evenly among the muffin cups. Since this is all-in-one at my son's ratio, I don't bother weighing out each one; if your calorie requirements are stricter you can transfer the batter to a bowl on a scale and weigh it, then divide by 12 and weigh out that amount into each muffin cup. Bake for 20-25 minutes until tops start to brown and a tester toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Allow to cool for ten minutes in the tin, then remove from tin and allow to finish cooling on a wire rack.

Variations:

The original recipe allows use of plain yogurt in lieu of the sour cream; you use the same volume, not weight, approximately 3/4 cup. If you're using the diet calculator you could play around with that to see what you can do for your ratio, but yogurt (at least the Fage whole milk Greek yogurt we use) is much lower in fat and higher in protein than sour cream, so it's tougher to hit a ratio target with yogurt.

You can play around a lot with the amount of blueberries. Even the 150g in the 2.5:1 recipe is a lot of blueberries, and you could decrease that to bump the ratio up.

Use smaller muffin tin liners and halve the amount of batter you put in for 24 x ~100 calorie snacks instead of a ~200 calorie meal.