Many years ago, my friend Marilyn told me about how she loved to make Morning Glory Muffins for her family on Christmas morning. I remembered seeing recipes for them in food magazines at the time and they sounded really delicious. But in reality, whenever I considered baking up a batch, I’d end up making my less ingredient-laden carrot muffins. Recently though, Marilyn told me she needed to make this family favorite gluten-free. And you know what happened next. I put on my baker’s hat and got to work.

I started researching recipes and found they all circled back to chef Pam McKinstry of the Morning Glory Café on Nantucket Island. McKinstry created this produce-rich muffin for her customers in 1978. She laced them with fragrant cinnamon, and packed them full of apple, carrot, coconut, pecans, and raisins. When her recipe appeared in Gourmet magazine in 1981, it proved to be so popular that the magazine decided to print it again ten years later.

The rest, shall we say, is history.

Naturally, bakers on the blogosphere have had their way with McKinstry’s recipe. They changed the size of the recipe. They changed the proportions. They added new ingredients and left out others. They tried to make the muffins “healthy”. They tried to make them sugar-free. They tried to make them oil-free. They added whole wheat. They added oats. They tried to make them vegan. Then they made them paleo. They left out the vanilla. And on and on. Back to basics! I decided to stay with the original recipe and found it in my copy of The Gourmet Cookbook, edited

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