One of my sons needed to do a presentation to his class about Native American culture. Being my kid, he chose food. Since other kids in the class were interested in food, she thought of a project where the kids can bring in a dish made from ingredients used by Native Americans.  She choose acorn flour.

At first I thought I was going to have to make acorn flour from scratch.  Instead the teacher gave each kid a bag of acorn flour.

I researched a couple of recipes out there on what to do with acorn flour and most of my results ended with cupcakes or some kind of bread.  The recipes also were not complete acorn flour recipes.  In other words, they took the wheat flour portion and cut it in half and replaced the other half with acorn flour.  This makes sense but at the same time, it’s not as pure of a recipe especially if you’re shooting for a gluten free result.  Lucky for me, I didn’t have to do that this round.

I stuck with a very basic cupcake recipe and swapped out half the flour with acorn flour.

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

3/4 cup cake flour
1 cup acorn flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 large eggs (separated)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 stick softened butter

Method

1. Take the butter out of the fridge, because if you’re like me, you don’t have softened butter sitting around.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Separate the eggs and whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks
3. Cream the butter, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla extract in a large bowl.
4. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour salt, and baking powder.
5. Alternate adding the dry ingredients with creamed ingredients.
6. Fold in egg whites.
7. Fill the cupcake cups only half-way!  The cupcakes will rise to full size.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cupcake comes out clean.
9. Let cool.

For decoration, my son decided that we should make the cupcakes look like acorns. We frosted with chocolate icing and then covered it with chocolate sprinkles.