Giant Chocolate Chip Muffins (Gluten Free)

So I recently purchased a nook. It's something that I've been wanting for a long time and I finally took the plunge. I downloaded several gluten free cookbooks to try, one of them being Gluten-Free Quick & Easy by Carol Fenster. If your interested it's available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

The first step in the Giant Chocolate Chip Muffin recipe is to make the Muffin mix skeleton.
I didn't use the suggested flours that are in the book, because I was unable to find the ones that were suggested. What I did do however is purchase Bob's Red Mill GF All-Purpose Baking Flour which contains all the ingredients that are recommended for the flour in the book.

Ingredients:
Bob's Red Mill GF All-Purpose Baking Flour (the entire bag)
3 cups cane sugar
8 teaspoons baking powder
6 teaspoons xanthan gum
4 teaspoons table salt

Take a sieve and sift the ingredients together over a storage container. Sift 2 cups flour blend, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 1/2 teaspoons of the xanthan gum and 1 teaspoon salt. Do this three times.

Seal the container and shake the contents

To make the muffins:
Ingredients:
3 cups of the above mix
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Hershey's).
2 eggs at room temperature
1 cup milk
1/2 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup chocolate chips
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup white chocolate chips (this is not part of the original recipe, I added it myself 'cause I like white chocolate).

You are going to need a LARGE muffin pan. I had to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and get one. It cost me $19.00 and was made by Chicago Metallic.
I greased the muffin pan using canola oil and set my oven to 375.
I mixed all my ingredients together and 'tasted' the batter before placing it in the muffin tin. This is where things got a little sketchy. The batter tasted horrible. A cross between chocolate flavored beans and a strong metallic taste. At this point I started adding sugar, salt and xanthan gum incrementally until the batter tasted good. I placed the batter in the muffin holes and cooked it for 30 minutes at 375. I took it out and it was still liquid in the middle so I turned my over down to 200 and cooked them ten minutes longer.
After taking them out and letting them cool I got my 'testers' (aka my two oldest children, my niece and nephew and my father-in-law) to try them. They were pretty good, for a first try. I'm not sure what they would've tasted like if I hadn't altered the batter, but I wasn't willing to take that chance.

Here are the end results: