Muffin Math

I love to bake! But I hate math! I've always been bad at it. It feels like a mean trick that I have to use math so much in my daily life with diabetes, but alas, that's the way the sugar-free/gluten-free cookie crumbles. ;)

Here's just a small example of the math I had to do in order to figure out how many carbs were in one muffin I made the other day:

Ingredients that contained carbs: yogurt, granulated sugar, gluten-free flour blend

1.5 C yogurt = 16.5 g/CHO  (according to the label)
1 C granulated sugar = 199.8 g/CHO (according to my "Food Counts" book)
1 gram special homemade gluten-free flour blend = .81 g/CHO (according to a ton of adding and multiplying and dividing my husband and I had to do a while ago. This blend has a bazillion different kinds of flours in it, so we had to figure it all out by hand. It took like 30 minutes!)
3 C of special homemade gluten-free flour blend = ~420 grams X .81 g/CHO per gram = ~340.2 g/CHO 

Soooo, then I add:


16.5 (yogurt) + 199.8 (sugar) + 340.2 (flour) = 556.5 g/CHO for the total recipe


556.5/12 (number of muffins made) =46.375 g/CHO per muffin! 

Phew!  I was proud of myself, though, because I had previously estimated that each muffin would probably have about 45 grams of carbs, and I was pretty close!

Of course, there are many more ingredients in this recipe than just yogurt, sugar and GF flour, but they are the main carbohydrate culprits, and everything else's contribution to the carb count would be negligible.

The muffins are fabulous, BTW. I'm pretty proud of them,even though they're not my own recipe at all. I just used a GF flour mix that Jeanne Sauvage of "Art of Gluten Free Baking" concocted with a 1:1 ratio for my favorite muffin recipe "Big Beautiful Muffins" from America's Test Kitchen, and voila! Yum! And I guess the math is worth it after all.