Healthy Banana Birthday Cake Mini Muffins
Sprinkles for breakfast? With this muffin, YES YOU CAN! This muffin is low sugar, low carb, super fun and super delicious! Finding something that's both healthy and fun for my kids to eat isn't always easy. But These Healthy Banana Birthday Cake Mini Muffins are a really big win!
As I mentioned before my son has had a struggle with an elevated A1c level. For a year we tried everything to bring it down and nothing worked efficiently. He went through months and months of blood tests and diet changes. We went low sugar, low carb, high fiber, high protein. By the end I was measuring out his rice portions at every meal and he was always hungry. It drove me insane. I felt hopeless and lost. I lived in constant fear that he was going over the diabetic edge just by eating an extra apple a day. And don't get me started on how many birthday cupcakes he had at school. I would cry at night thinking about it.
Fast forward to now. We had him tested for the diabetes antibody and it came back negative. So that was a major relief. We just needed to manage his diet and didn't need to go overboard on the sugar cutting. But during this time, I found searching for low sugar recipes absolutely mind boggling. I could't find anything that didn't have some sugar replacement such as stevia or Splenda. It may be fine for some, but I really didn't want to give these to my child aside from the fact that I felt that their bitter aftertaste wasn't very pleasant. The only sugar replacement I found to be acceptable was monk fruit sweetner. It didn't have as much of an aftertaste and came from a fruit which made me feel like it was more natural. Unfortunately our endocrinologist didn't agree so I was back to square one.
So I set out to reduce to sugar in every recipe I made. Or to find ones that only relied on fruit to sweeten the end product. I found that I was able to reduce the sugar in most recipes by a 1/4-1/2 without much affect aside from sweetness. And since I found a lot of baked goods tasted way too sweet for me anyways, this was a relief.
So on to this recipe. The idea came from a paleo mug cake that a co worker use to make for us as our mid day snack. It was just banana, almond flour, honey and baking powder. Super simple to make in an office lunch room. So I decided to make it into mini muffins for the kids. I tested the recipe with just almond flour and just didn't have the texture I needed for a muffin. I decided to add oat flour in order to give it a bit more structure and it totally worked. The muffin has a light texture without being mushy and the only thing that sweetens it are bananas! I added sprinkles just to make it fun for the kids, but if you can always take them out.
Healthy Banana Birthday Cake Mini Muffins
Yields approx. 24 mini muffins
Ingredients
- 2 ripe bananas, mashed
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 tbsp canola oil
- 1 cup oat flour
- 1 cup almond flour
- 2 tbsp wheat germ
- 1 tsp backing powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tbsp sprinkles, plus extra for topping
- rolled oats for topping
Method
- 1. Pre heat oven to 350F
- Place wet ingredients (Bananas- oil) into a bowl and whisk together till combined
- Place dry ingredients (Oat flour-salt) into a separate bowl and whisk together
- Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix till it's just combined.
- Fold in sprinkles
- Divide the batter into the mini muffin tins. (About 2 tbsp per muffin)
- Top with a sprinkle of oats and more sprinkles
- Bake for 12- 15 minutes or until edges are a light golden brown
- Cool for 5- 10 minutes in the pan then place on a wire rack to cool completely
- Store in an air tight container