Prep Time : 20 minutes minutes

Cook Time : 25 minutes minutes

These gluten free strawberry muffins with a tender crumb and crisp, bakery-style muffin top, are packed with plenty of fresh strawberries for a burst of berry flavor in every bite.

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You know the warm weather is coming when the strawberries in the store start to smell like actual strawberries! You can make these moist and tender gluten free strawberry muffins any time you can get your hands on some fresh berries, but I’d wait until the strawberries are at least a little fragrant (and they aren’t so overpriced!).

Why you’ll love these gluten free strawberry muffins

Once you have your basic muffin ingredients assembled, including your bright and fresh, juicy red strawberries, the batter for these muffins is ready super fast. Your strawberries don’t have to be perfect, either, since we’re baking them.

We’re sprinkling of a few more chopped strawberries on top of each well of muffin batter just for a hint of what’s inside and a beautiful presentation. But if your strawberries aren’t perfect, skip the sprinkling and just bake the muffins as is. No one will mind once they smell the muffins baking and take that first bite!

Since we want a crisp top and a tighter crumb than, say, strawberry cupcakes, we don’t cream the butter and sugar together when preparing the batter. Instead we melt the butter, mix it with milk and eggs, and the sugars, and mix that into the dry ingredients.

Baking muffins with fruit in them is not quite as simple as taking a classic gluten free muffin recipe and adding some berries. Any time you add fruit to muffin batter, but especially strawberries, you’re adding a ton of moisture to the batter. You need to rebalance the other ingredients in the muffin so it bakes all the way through and still has that beautiful tender crumb.

Recipe ingredients

Here are the ingredients you’ll need to make these gf strawberry muffins:

• GF flour blend: Since we’re replacing wheat flour when we’re baking gluten free, the flour blend is the most important ingredient you’ll select. Please be sure to use one of my recommended gf flour blends, and avoid the ones I caution against! Believe me I wish they were all as good as the ones I recommend!
• Baking powder: Double-acting baking powder begins to work as soon as it’s added to the wet ingredients, and then acts again when it goes in the oven to give our muffins lift—but be sure to get them in the oven fast, so the texture stays just right.
• Salt: Kosher salt, or lightly flaked sea salt, are common in baking mostly because it’s harder to overmeasure them than it is table salt. You can use a touch less table salt, though, if that’s all you have.
• Milk: I like to bake with whole (4{28c990c5ec46bc12a8a6e519302e6740183955f80b5fc5356445979e411ee393}) milk, because it adds flavor and richness, but as long as your milk is at least 2{28c990c5ec46bc12a8a6e519302e6740183955f80b5fc5356445979e411ee393}, it’s fine.
• Butter: Here, we melt the butter since we’re not creaming it with the sugar to add more air to these muffins. The butter adds tenderness and flavor, but not structure. Instead, it gives the muffins some pleasant chew.
• Eggs: The eggs provide structure and help the muffins rise into a beautiful dome.
• Granulated sugar: Granulated sugar sweetens the muffins, keeps them tender (sugar isn’t just forsweetness!), and helps create the crisp brown muffin top.
• Light brown sugar: A touch of light brown sugar adds moisture to your muffins without making them too wet.
• Chopped strawberries: Get the freshest berries you can, cut off the tops, then cut each in half, then each half in half again for quarters. Chop into 4 or 5 pieces each.

How to make gluten free strawberry muffins

These muffins are made simply in a mixing bowl, without creaming together butter and sugar. Here’s how to make them, step by step:

• Assemble the wet ingredients (milk, butter, and eggs), along with the granulated and light brown sugars.
• Whisk these ingredients together until very smooth. If any of the wet ingredients is cold, the butter will clump even if it was melted and smooth first, so be sure everything is at room temperature.
• In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the gf flour blend, xanthan gum, baking powder, and salt.
• Use a mixing spoon to create a well in the center of the dry ingredients, and pour in the wet mixture.
• Mix until the ingredients are combined, then, working quickly, add the chopped strawberries. Fold in the strawberries so you don’t crush them, but make sure they’re evenly distributed throughout the batter.
• Fill the lined and greased wells of your standard 12-cup muffin tin full with batter, and smooth the tops gently if the batter is bumpy on top.
• If you’d like your muffins to be more beautiful, sprinkle the tops of the batter in each well with some more chopped strawberries (you’ll only need another 2 medium-size strawberries for the whole batch), and then with a light dusting of a coarsely ground sugar.
• Bake the muffins at 375°F/190°C for at least 25 minutes.
• The mufins are not done baking until you can insert a tester (like a toothpick) in the center of the middle muffin and it comes out with only a few moist crumbs attached. If the tester seems wet or tacky, keep baking.

Tips for making these strawberry muffins

User muffin tin liners

You can bake these muffins without lining the wells of your muffin tin, but I prefer to line the wells because the muffins bake more evenly with the sides insulted by the paper. Plus, the liners help keep the muffins from sticking to the tin after baking.

Grease your liners

I also like to grease the muffin liners to ensure that the liners themselves won’t stick to the muffins. I like to spray the liners before I put them in the tin to avoid getting cooking oil spray all over the tin, which will burn in the oven.

Choose your gluten free flour blend carefully

The biggest difference between a gluten free recipe and a conventional one is, of course, the type of flour you use. No single gluten free flour can support a whole recipe like wheat flour can, so we use a blend of different flour that mimic the performance of wheat flour.

A gluten free recipe isn’t just a “regular” recipe with gluten free flour added, though. Itneeds a different balance of ingredients to get the most out of that gluten free flour blend, too, of course.

But the first, most important choice you’ll make in any gluten free baking is what flour blend to use. You must use one of my recommended all purpose gluten free flour blends to get the results you see here, and measure by weight since volume measurements are unreliable.

Most of the commercial gluten free blends that are available are simply not properly balanced, inconsistent in quality (sometimes you’ll get a better batch, oftentimes worse), and use gritty rice flour that tastes bad and doesn’t combine properly with the other ingredients.

Use one of my recommended gluten free flour blends, or one of my “mock” recipes so you can build your own version of these blends, and you’ll be successful the very first time.

Use fragrant fresh strawberries

The strawberries are the star of the show here, so be sure to select berries from the store that smell like strawberries. Otherwise, your muffins just won’t taste like strawberry muffins, and instead will be sort of bland. They don’t have to look perfect. They just have to have flavor.

Gluten free strawberry muffins ingredient substitution suggestions

I haven’t tried these muffins with any substitutions to eliminate additional allergens, and I advise against making substitutions of any ingredients unless absolutely necessary. Each substitution takes you further away from the recipe as written, and a recipe is a formula.

But if you have additional food intolerances or allergies, here are my best educated guesses:

Dairy free strawberry muffins

There is dairy in these muffins in the milk and in the butter. In place of the milk, try unsweetened almond milk or your favorite nondairy milk. Be sure to use something that has some fat, though, or your muffins will be less tender.

In place of butter, try Melt brand or Miyoko’s Kitchen brand vegan butter. Don’t use oil, though, since oil has no moisture and butter does, so they aren’t proper substitutes for one another in baking.

Egg free strawberry muffins

There are 2 eggs in these muffins, and in my experience you can usually replace up to 2 eggs in a standard 12-muffin recipe.

My favorite egg substitute is 1 “chia egg” (1 tablespoon ground white chia seeds + 1 tablespoon lukewarm water, mixed and allowed to gel) per regular egg. You will see fleks of chia in your muffins, but you shouldn’t taste anything different.

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