Recipe: Gluten Free Oatmeal Spice Muffins

I was so excited to see a recipe for Gluten-Free Oatmeal Spice Muffins show up on Money Saving Mom last week. My mom cannot eat anything with wheat and she also cannot eat anything with dairy. She is so good about eating only the foods that are allowed, but it bothers me when she can't eat the foods the rest of us eat, which is most of the time.

I am always on the look out for baked goods that are gluten and dairy free, especially ones that use common ingredients. I know she misses eating bread and cake and cookies, and gluten free flours taste very different than traditional flour in baking, so the baked goods taste really different as well.

With a few tweaks, this recipe worked wonderfully and didn't require me to purchase too many ingredients. We made a half batch this time to see how we liked them. Here are the changes I made:

• I used both white and brown sugar and added a bit more than the recipe called for. :)
• I substituted orange juice for milk. She does use rice milk, and that would have worked as well, but since we didn't have rice milk, the orange juice was a good alternative.
• I added cinnamon instead of nutmeg.
• I left out the orange peel.
• The margarine she can eat is the Fleischmann's Unsalted Stick Margarine, so I used that for the melted margarine on the top. 

The result was a really yummy muffin that doesn't taste different from other baked goods. My daughter and husband loved them when we tested them out first.

How do you deal with family members that have food allergies or restrictions?