Recipe: Guiltless, delicious vegan carrot-banana muffins

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Recipe: Guiltless, delicious vegan carrot-banana muffins

Sometimes I get a little distracted while baking and forget to put an ingredient in. Baking soda, sugar, oil, salt — if you bake for long enough, you’ll forget one or all of these ingredients at one time or another.

Usually, it spells disaster for the final product. But every once in a while you make a fortuitous omission, discovering after the fact that forgoing what you thought was an essential ingredient leads to no disaster at all, or even improves the final product.

It happened today.

I forgot to put any sweetener in my muffins.

And they were delicious.

They were also moist, flavorful, and — yes — sweet.

Not carrot-cake sweet. More like the sweetness of a yam. If you want your muffins sweeter than that, well — I’ve left in the option of adding xylitol or sugar. These muffins are great either way.

Supplies

  • measuring cups and spoons
  • 1 mixing bowl
  • blender
  • muffin tin with 12 2½-inch cups
  • cooling rack

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 1½ tablespoons flax seed
  • 1½ cup very ripe banana
  • 2¼ cup grated carrots
  • 1½ cups white whole wheat flour or gluten-free oat flour
  • ¼ cup xylitol or sugar (optional)
  • ½ teaspoon salt (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • ¾ teaspoon ground cardamom
  • ¼ teaspoon allspice
Instructions
  1. In a blender, puree the banana with ½ cup of the carrots, the flax seed, and the oil until smooth.
  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, salt, baking soda and spices, as well as xylitol or sugar if you are using sweetener.
  3. Add the remainder of the carrots and mix until well blended.
  4. Pour the banana-carrot mixture into the bowl and stir until just blended.
  5. Use a spoon to drop the batter into a greased or lined muffin pan, filling each cup at least ¾ full.
  6. Bake 20-25 minutes in a 375°F oven. Muffins are ready when inserted toothpick comes out clean.
  7. Set on a rack and cool.

0 thoughts on “Recipe: Guiltless, delicious vegan carrot-banana muffins”

  1. Lovely post - I really relate to forgetting one ingredient at some point - sometimes I don't recall until I'm actually eating the meal. I love this recipe and have just one question - do you need both the baking powder and baking soda?Reply
    • You can substitute with 1.5 teaspoon soda or 1.5 tablespoons baking powder instead. If you use only soda, the muffins might be a little denser -- baking powder tends maintain its leavening action longer into the baking process. in addition, baking soda benefits from the addition of acid for improved leavening, so if you use only baking soda you might want to add a tablespoon of lemon juice, orange juice, or vinegar. I remembered about forgetting the xylitol as soon as I put the muffins in the oven. I thought about taking them out and remixing, but decided that I wanted to find out how they tasted. (besides, remixing at that point could have resulted in a tough batter.) I'm glad I did, because now I can stop adding sweetener to these muffins when I bake them!Reply

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