Five Ingredient Gluten Free Baking?

Well... not exactly.

But this recipe was adapted from something that I saw Claire Robinson make on Food Network.  For those of you who don't know Claire Robinson, she hosts Five Ingredient Fix.  She's totally adorable, young, cool and has a lot of great cooking ideas.  We like her so much we got tickets to see her at the NYC Food & Wine Festival next month.  One Sunday morning we were watching and she made these incredible looking Brown Butter Banana Muffins and I made it my mission to make them gluten free.

Something you need to understand is that gluten free baking cannot be done with only five ingredients.  Even if you are using a GF flour blend mixture, you still need to tinker with it and add more stuff like baking powder and xanthan gum.  So that turns the self rising flour that Claire uses into 3 ingredients.  Since I blew it there, I added one more ingredient for additional flavor - vanilla extract.  So here are the ingredients that I used:

Gluten Free Brown Butter Banana Muffins
4 ripe bananas
1/3 cup agave nectar
1 stick of butter (eek!  i know... i never use this much butter, but it's worth it - plus it's being divided by 12 muffins)
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups Pamela's Gluten Free Pancake & Baking Mix
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. xanthan gum

Since Claire has already written up this recipe HERE, I'll just tell you what I did differently.  I whisked together the GF flour mix, baking powder and xanthan gum and used that in place of self rising flour.  Also, when you add the mashed banana mixture to the butter to cook for a few minutes, I added the vanilla extract.

These muffins came out sooooo good... they were very moist and for only "five" ingredients, the flavor was very deep.  What I love about Claire's recipes is that she really utilizes each ingredient to it's fullest potential.  In this recipe, by browning the butter, you get a deep, almost caramel flavor through the muffin.  Then cooking some of the banana mixture in the brown butter takes the banana ingredient to an entirely different level.  This is really a great recipe... and I would even play around with it by adding nuts and maybe a few other ingredients to make it your own.  Enjoy :)