Christmas morning muffins

I try to accommodate all breakfast requests on Christmas morning and Phil, my husband, asked for a continental breakfast this year.  We lived in Holland for ten years and he used to treat me to a delivered breakfast hamper on my birthday.  A guy dressed in a fluffy white dressing gown would show up with a huge box filled with orange juice, tea, bread rolls, croissants, hard boiled eggs, yoghurts, flavoured sprinkles (called hagelslag - love and miss them now we're back in England!) and cheeses, jams... you get the idea.  I've never seen this service offered in the UK and it's such a pity.  I've bought most of the products needed for the perfect continental breakfast and unfortunately I can't have many of them!  It's so annoying that gluten-free bread is made with egg and most normal supermarket bread contains soya.  Ah, well. I've found some Italian-style rolls I can have and coconut yoghurt.  I've also made some Christmas morning muffins, adapted from a recipe of Nigella's.  Again, I haven't made these before.  I swapped out the milk and replaced it with unsweetened almond milk and replaced the egg with Orgran no egg.  I didn't have any vegetable oil so I used sunflower oil.  The recipe required me to zest and juice two clementines.  I think I would have had more success trying to bottle smoke.  They were so soft and squishy and this was the aftermath...

Hopefully it will be worth it.  They smelled delicious when cooking and this is the result...

A couple of cook books arrived today - The Food Allergy Mama's Baking Book and The Food Allergy Mama's Easy, Fast Family Meals.  Both by Kelly Rudnicki.  A lady with five children, one with food allergies.  She could be me if I was a talented cook from the US instead of a slovenly Brit with questionable baking skills.  I have only flipped through them so far and I'm particularly excited about the recipes in the baking book.  Kelly commonly suggests rice milk in her recipes so I'll have to get hold of some of that.  I hope the muffins turn out ok with unsweetened almond milk.  I would have thought it would be ok for a Christmassy recipe?  I don't have a fluffy white dressing gown but will serve the breakfast tomorrow with a slightly tatty blue dressing gown and a happy smile :)  Merry Christmas to all!

Update

We just got back from bowling and being thrashed by the kids at air hockey.  My eyes fell upon the muffins as soon as I walked through the door and I had to try one.  Delicious doesn't do it justice, and I am a very severe critic of my own cooking.  It was light, moist, sweet and very attractive when sliced in two thanks to the zest and dried cranberries.  The only problem is, as Phil pointed out, I didn't make enough.  I can't expect all my allergy-friendly baking attempts to be this successful but this is a great start.