Beautiful weekend and a Special Birthday celebration!

HI there!! This past week was filled with lots of Fall cleaning, more decorating and baking. This past weekend, we celebrated my son’s 21st birthday!! We had such a wonderful time going to our local winery, listening to some great vocal & acoustic performances from the talented Andy Cavanaugh, and having a lovely takeout meal at home with our family & watching our son happily opening his birthday gifts! We had a fun weekend full of laughs, great conversations(as always), card playing, breakfast out on the back deck & absolutely GORGEOUS weather!! The temperature never reached about the mid-70’s and the sun was shining brightly, along with a pleasant cool breeze!! It was the perfect weekend to celebrate the greatest sons we could ever dream of!

Saturday, we enjoyed homemade lemon-poppy seed muffins and on Sunday, a bit of an English breakfast with eggs on toast, tempeh bacon, homemade baked beans (a recipe you can find in my cookbook, “Plant-Based Living for the Gluten Free Cook”), mixed fresh berries, tea & coffee.

Over the weekend, we played a bit of trivia (we love our games here!!) & discussed plans for the Fall garden. It was an eventful and fun weekend!!

Here’s the Lemon Poppy seed muffins recipe:

Ingredients:

2 1/4 cups gluten free all purpose flour

1 3/4 tsps baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 tsp coarse sea salt

1/4 cup Swerve granular sugar substitute, plus extra for topping

3/4 cup stevia

2 large eggs, room temperature

1 1/2 tsps lemon zest, plus extra for sprinkling on top (about 2 lemons)

1/4 cup lemon juice (from the same 2 lemons)

1/4 cup almond milk, room temperature

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted grass fed butter, melted and cooled

3 Tbsps poppy seeds

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 1 1/2 muffin tins (18 muffin cups) with coconut oil spray. Set aside.
Melt butter. Set aside to cool. Measure out ingredients. Zest lemons. Juice lemons & place in small ramikins. Set aside.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
In a large bowl, whisk together, sugar substitute & stevia, eggs, zest, lemon juice & almond milk. Whisk in the butter.
Pour wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until just combined. Do not overmix.
Stir the poppy seeds into the batter until just combined.
With a 1/4 cup measuring cup, pour the batter into muffin cups.
Bake for 18 minutes.
Cool in pan for 5 minutes on cooling racks. While they’re cooling, brush some melted butter on tops & sprinkle with more stevia or granular sugar substitute. Top with extra lemon zest.
After the 5 minutes, place on a serving dish & serve warm. These are delicious with orange juice or a tea.

Enjoy!! Hope you all had a Fabulous weekend as well!! Can you feel the Autumn in the air?