Easy Flourless Muffins, Bars & Cookies: Delicious Recipes for Healthy, Portable Gluten-Free Snacks

by Amanda Drozdz

80 Muffins and Snacks So Flavorful, You’d Never Guess They’re Gluten-Free and Good for You!

Easy Flourless Muffins, Bars and Cookies makes snacking a healthful and nourishing affair. Muffins are the perfect portable breakfast or mid-day snack, making it easy for readers to fuel their energy throughout the day! Many other gluten-free recipes call for expensive and hard-to-find alternative ingredients like tapioca flour or xanthum gum, but author Amanda Drozdz—of the popular cooking blog Running With Spoons—focuses on common, recognizable ingredients such as oats, ground almonds, fresh fruit, greek yogurt, coconut oil, coconut flour and honey.

The book features 60 muffins, including classics like Chocolate Chip Muffins and Lemon Poppyseed Muffins; energy-packed breakfasts such as Blueberry Flax Muffins; coffeehouse favorites like Coffee Cake Greek Yogurt Muffins; savory muffins like Pizza Muffins; and, best of all, a whole chapter of chocolate-lover muffins like Rocky Road Muffins. Several recipes are vegan, oil-free or added-sugar-free for those looking for the healthiest options. The remaining 20 recipes are healthfully indulgent brownies and bars like Salted Caramel Brownies and Apple Crumble Bars, as well as cookies like Honey Almond Oatmeal Cookies. With so many options—and all of them using ingredients readers can trust to nourish them—this cookbook is a wonderful resource for anyone looking for grab-and-go breakfasts, quick and easy snacks and healthy desserts.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

192 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2017

Reviews

[Punk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great cookbook for people who like muffins, are (mostly) dairy free, and can tolerate oats and almonds (or some other nut or seed). If you have a high-speed blender, the muffins take mere seconds to prepare, and in many cases you can be eating hot muffins in under twenty minutes.

First, though, that "flourless" is a misnomer. The book is gluten free, but nearly everything in it calls for oat flour or almond flour. Drozdz gets around this by calling for whole oats, and then having you pulverize them in the blender. That's oat flour, but whatever.

Most of these recipes are made in a high-powered blender, and call for rolled oats, flax meal, honey, almond butter, almond milk, eggs, and sometimes Greek yogurt, applesauce, or almond flour; coconut flour is used, but rarely. Most of the recipes have no added oil or refined sugar, most are dairy free, and some are even grain free. At the top of each recipe, it tells you what it's free from. None of the recipes use gums, and there's only the occasional use of starch in the form of arrowroot powder (or you can use corn starch instead). If, like me, you don't have a high-powered blender, you can still make everything in the book. Instead of whipping up rolled oats, I use oat flour and hand mix everything, which is fine, the muffin batters are all very easy to stir and come together quickly.

The book has a color photo for each muffin, bar, or cookie, and they're all really inviting. The recipes have measurements by volume and weight (grams), storage advice, and headnotes that describe taste and texture. Sometimes a recipe will allow for substitutions, though the book doesn't go into much depth there. Luckily you can sub out the almond milk for any kind of milk or liquid, and use a different nut or seed product in place of the almond butter and probably even the almond flour. Nearly everything is sweetened with honey, so you could probably substitute your favorite liquid sweetener, and there's the occasional use of coconut sugar, which can be replaced with brown sugar or some other granulated sweetener.

There's a lot of chocolate and bananas, as well as carrots, zucchini, apples, pumpkin, and muffins with cheesecake topping. There's even an entire chapter for one-serving microwave muffins, as well as one devoted to chocolate. The chocolate muffins all have the same almond flour base with cocoa powder and a variety of mix ins. I made one or two of the microwave muffins, and while they're not ideal in texture, they are fast and hot, and since they're made with oats and almonds, they're satisfying. Just use a larger mug than you think you need. Those things puff up when you zap them.

I made every muffin in this cookbook that didn't require dairy, and they all turned out great. Which is no surprise because they're all variations on the same oat flour or almond flour base. There can be a sameness about the recipes (banana bread muffins vs. banana muffins with nuts—it's the same recipe, but is presented as two), but that also makes it easy to make your own flavor variations, or tweak a recipe and apply those changes across the board. For example, I wished some of the muffins were just a bit sweeter, and one day I accidentally added an extra 40 grams of honey to the lemon muffins I was making (I squeezed the honey bear too hard!) and they tasted like delicious cake with no negative impact on the texture. So I learned I could add more honey if I wanted to.

The muffins are moist and light, have a tender crumb, and last on the counter for days—often up to a week!—without getting stale. In fact, they go moldy before they go stale (speaking from sad experience here). None of the muffins are what you'd call sweet, and even the chocolate ones taste more like an energy snack than a dessert.

Speaking of dessert, this book has that too, but I've only made the brownies, which did taste like a dessert, sweet and chocolatey and dense and sticky. There are cookies made with an almond butter base, and a number of bar cookies. All pretty much using the same ingredients as the ones I've mentioned.

And, like the title says, the recipes are easy! The index is thorough, too. It's just a really nice book, and I highly recommend it if it fits with your diet.

[Pamela Hatch · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title grabbed my attention since how can you bake without flour and most are without oil, dairy, and refined sugar. But the idea is not using wheat flour but other things like oats with flaxseed, almond milk, almond butter, honey or maple syrup, etc.

The pictures are absolutely gorgeous and make your mouth water -- I want to try most of them.

I don't have most of these ingredients in my current pantry, but once you purchase them, most of the ingredients will make any of the recipes in the book.

I have given it three stars but it might go higher once I am able to cook something and see how it tastes.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the muffins in this book are made with oatmeal that is mixed in a blender until it is flour, so to some extend a little boring. But oat flour in general is so easy to substitute for something else that these recipes work out really well for a person with 20 different flours in her freezer that she needs to use.
There is a table in the back of the book that gives the equivalent oat flour measurements if you don't use rolled oats. This I have used to try other flours. Like Einkorn, Buckwheat, & Rye. All of which have turned out wonderfully.
I also didn't bother using honey, and just added regular white sugar to the recipes. Didn't seem to effect them at all and it is a lot cheaper.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am always looking for recipes that make snacking for our family healthier. Amanda Drozdz nails it with these recipes. Only disappointment is that I can't send them to school with my two youngest due to the liberal use of almond butter and/or flour. Oh well! :)

[Cody · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should be called the OAT cookbook. I can't have oats on my gluten free diet so it was pretty disappointing to see them as the main ingredient in almost every recipe!